There’s a post over at Brazen Careerist featuring a 20 minute TED talk video by Barry Schwartz about his book The Paradox of Choice. The post (essentially about unplugging for a bit and seeing what hurts) doesn’t have so much to do with the talk, and it’s the talk that I commented on, a bit windily. It might not make a lot of sense if you don’t watch the video, but then it might be just obvious. I’ve added to it and cross posted it below…
Frequently pairing down stuff and stimuli is revealing, interesting and healthy. It can (and usually does) reveal to us many of the little strings that pull us back and forth through our lives.
Yes, the paralysis of indecision is frustrating (whether it’s 14 million kinds of chips or two kinds of toothpaste.). Take any aspiring writer with infinite choice every time they see a blinking cursor and ask them about that freedom. It’s why “forms” of art have evolved, but that’s a discussion for another time.
He’s right in that it IS our fault if we choose wrong by having chosen hastily. It is also our fault if we stand there at the salad dressing isle and say “duh” for 15 minutes.
The solution to this is simple: Educate yourself and make a choice. If it’s important to you, choose. And this is the idea that ruins his point. You CAN know, you CAN choose.
If your jean selection is important to you (as mine most assuredly is to me), you need only do the research once. You don’t have to do it every time you walk into a store. THEN you actually HAVE the best. You’re in the best of both worlds. The only reason “opportunity cost” dilutes the value of a choice made is if you were unable to avail yourself of the opposing opportunities. I contend that having walked out of the store with perfect fitting jeans was a triumph. But the fact that it ruins utterly the point, so he fabricated the canard of dissatisfaction and misnamed it ‘opportunity cost’.
Opportunity cost is only a cost if the missed opportunity could have been a better choice. If you have 10 pairs of jeans and you try them all on, select the best then leave the store with them, there is no “missed opportunity.” If you only try on 5, select one of those, then leave the store with that pair then yes, you will look over your shoulder wondering whether or not one of the other five would have been better. THAT is “opportunity cost.” In this, Mr. Schwartz flat out lies to make his point, because it’s the only way he can.
I was actually surprised that he came out and declared flatly what he’d spent 20 minutes implying: “Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people.”
So…
He wants the government to intervene and take money from those who earn it, FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
This implies, among other more obvious points that no doubt leap immediately to the mind of any reasonable thinking person, that it is someone else’s duty to decide what will make you happy, that they know, and that they should and will make those choices for you, insuring that you are unfettered by the burden of having too much choice.
And guess what happens when you remove choices. The best jeans? Yeah, they go away. This would apparently be a tremendous relief for herr Schwartz, who seems to find the selection process cripplingly cumbersome. The salad dressing you like? Well… it wasn’t the salad dressing MOST people like so we pulled it off the shelves. The car you wanted? Well… they don’t make it any more because studies show that most people liked this one instead (or, as is already the case, “you can’t have that one because this one is better for you.”)
The reason there are 187 kinds of salad dressing on the shelves is that there are 187 kinds of people who like them. (Frankly I suspect there is room for 250 varieties of salad dressing, if not more. Do you want to try your hand at adding one? You can.) Believe me, if a profit motivated entity put out a flavor of salad dressing that nobody bought… it wouldn’t live on the shelf for a month. The minute sales data came back saying “nobody buys it” it would disappear. (Remember purple ketchup? New Coke?)
Yes. It’s our fault if we choose poorly or hastily. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter to us, sometimes it does. Where we are allowed to decide, we win. Personally I couldn’t possibly care less about salad dressing, olive oil variety or pasta brand. Try to take my favorite pizza and I will nail your hand to the table with my fork.
What we are missing is a little bit of discipline. Habits of organizing thought and decisions. We have unprecedented freedom and as a culture we’re still growing in to what that means. Shouldering the responsibility of freedom is no easier than obtaining it was in the first place. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.
Mr. Schwartz is wrong. If we have few choices and are left with “well… the best there is” then it IS our fault. It’s our fault because we’ve chosen to give up freedoms and liberties in favor of an oppressive, intrusive government that will choose for us, which he seems to want.
Mr. Schwartz didn’t write his book to answer a question. He didn’t write it for the public good. He wrote it to make money, so that he’d have more choices.
And I applaud him for that.
UPDATE: Well, I was going to expand it. But I think the additional points are better served in a subsequent post.
