[extropy-chat] ECON/Liberty: Is choice bad for you?

[Mike Lorrey]

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040301crbo_books

"Researchers of cognitive dissonance in the nineteen-fifties found that
consumers would continue to read ads for a new car after they’d bought
it but would avoid information about other brands, fearing
post-purchase misgivings. And in the early eighties the social thinker
Albert O. Hirschman, in “Shifting Involvements,” sought to introduce
the concept of “disappointment” into mainstream economic theory. “The
world I am trying to understand,”he wrote (and the desperate italics
are in the original), “is one in which men think they want one thing
and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want
it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that
something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really
want.”

Mischoosing of this kind is what Barry Schwartz, a social scientist at
Swarthmore, has in mind in his new book, “The Paradox of Choice” (Ecco;
$23.95). In his view, “unlimited choice” can “produce genuine
suffering.” Schwartz makes his case mostly through research in
psychology and behavioral economics—research that shows how far real
people are from the perfectly rational “utility maximizers” posited by
classical economists."

This looks to be a very interesting book. Has anyone on the list read
it yet (of course, I'd hate to buy it and then discover I'd
mischosen...;) ).



=====
Mike Lorrey
Chairman, Free Town Land Development
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
                                       - Gen. John Stark
Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com

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