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Is Too Much Choice Stressing Us Out? (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the decades following World War 2, there was a dramatic expansion in choices for consumers. Where before there were only a few brands of bread, now there were dozens. Marketers were relentless in trying to fill every niche, to capture every last market segment. But in the 1990s and 2000s, we started to realize that this wasn't inherently a good thing. Choice paralysis demonstrably exists. It's made us start asking questions like: do we really need 30 types of jam on a store shelf? Is there a good reason for a firm to offer over 150 different pension plans? It turns out, no. Employees are much less likely to actually choose a plan when confronted with so many. In worrying about finding the best choice, they accidentally pick what is by far the worst: nothing. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who helped bring this idea to the fore, has been advocating for less choice, and offers this suggestion: "The secret to happiness is low expectations."
Relentless growth relies on a large subset of the buying public being able to make poor decisions on what to buy, then having to replace that item shortly thereafter. This choice reduction seems like some commie nonsense to me.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Often, it seems what they really need is an informed third party to assist them in whittling down their options to a manageable choice threshold.
Looking at you America: 30 types of jam, 60 fragrances of febreze, and still two political parties... See? They're keeping it simple for us.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Whenever we don't have many choice, for example: High Speed Internet and Cable TV, is a virtual monopoly or duopoly.
We get gouged on pricing, and shoddy service.
And then you develop what's called a "preference". There's also this social thing called "word of mouth" that you can use to communicate benefits. Also, stores/shops usually carry a selection, not a complete catalog of everything on the planet.
Choice is good, and the good news is you're not locked in. If you don't like it, you can try again the next time, and maybe even get a reimbursement from a quality guarantee, many products have this. If you just don't have the time to get informed and need to make a rush decision, there are even many review sites that offer a meta score and you can just pick something from the top of the list and get a quick bluirb that will give you a bearing.
Or just go with your gut.
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Personally, I can get by just fine with three choices in jam.
Most everyone I know can manage with three to four choices in jam.
But they're not the SAME three to four choices!
So by the time your grocery is stocking everyone's three to four choices, it has 100 or so different things on the shelf.
Ditto bread, meat, veggies, soap, shampoo, etc.
IOW, a large number of choices isn't a bad thing. Unless you're just too stupid to be allowed to make choices in the first place....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is a HUGE difference between "30 types of jam" and "over 150 different pension plans".
At the most basic level, you will know that you picked the "wrong" jam in the near future and still be able to get a different one.
With a pension plan you won't really know until it is too late and you won't have any option.
Which is why most of us do NOT have a problem picking up a loaf of bread and a jar of jam.
...In worrying about finding the best choice, they accidentally pick what is by far the worst: nothing....
What is "accidental" and "worst" about picking nothing. To me that means that the person didn't really want/need the item in the first place, and the plethora of choices led the person to make the correct choice, ie., nothing.
It is not the amount of choice that is freaking us out, it is the amount of effort to get to know what the choice actually is and how to get it. Especially due to capitalism, full products are deliberately crippled to plunder the customers. Nowadays, you can have a full-time job managing a company's software licenses. And the bigger the manufacturer, the less sense the license model has.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I think a big factor here is whether the choice relates to a luxury or a necessity. And to be clear, I'm going to stretch the definition of "necessity" slightly, to include things such as pension plans. In fact, the words "luxury" and "necessity" aren't really quite the right ones here, but I can't think of better ones.
When it comes to necessities, what we generally want is security. We want to find something that works for us fairly quickly and to then have the mental security that comes from being able to stick with it. This is why so few people switch banks or utility providers, even though they could often save money by doing so. Being bombarded with options when buying something you need (rather than something you want) is stressful. You'll be likely to fixate more on the downsides of making the wrong choice rather than the upsides of making the right choice.
When it comes to luxuries, on the other hand, we tend to like choice. If we can afford high end food products, we like to be able to choose from lots of different varieties. If we're buying a luxury car, we want to be able to pick and choose options. Having choices makes us excited about our shiny new purchase.
The complicating factor here is that the line between necessities and luxuries isn't static and won't be the same for everybody. If you have a lot of disposable income, you will probably approach your food-shop as though you're shopping for luxuries. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you will be firmly in necessity mode (I've been in both camps).
It's not even all about income. I can illustrate this with a comparison between myself and my mother. We both actually have fairly similar levels of disposable income, but our interests and priorities are very different.
I'm a big PC user; I enjoy gaming on a high end PC. I bought a full new PC recently. Deciding I couldn't be bothered with a self-build this time, I looked around for UK-based vendors who would allow me to customise my build extensively before they put it together. I took time to do my research, picked out the case, the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card and all the rest. And yes, I quite enjoyed this. I chose the vendor I did largely because they offered me this degree of control, rather than an off the peg system.
My mother, by contrast, does not like PCs. She needs one, but she doesn't like that fact and doesn't treat it as anything more than a tool. When her old laptop died and she needed a replacement, she found the degree of choice available first confusing and then infuriating. We eventually solved it after I looked around for 3 acceptable options and narrowed the choice down to those for her ("this one costs a bit more but has a bigger screen, that one costs a bit less but might be a bit slow to start up").
Flip things around to the last time we bought new sofas; I spent an afternoon browsing online for something that was about the right size, reasonably cheap and not a horrible colour clash for my living room. My mother spent a month and a half of weekends walking around show-rooms and comparing textile samples.
We each believe that the other is completely mad. But what it really comes down to is a value judgement over "luxury" vs "necessity" and how that impacts on your approach to choice.
I think that this is the main reason that Apple is doing so well. People understand exactly what they are getting when they choose an Apple product. You want a phone, You get to choose from 1 of 2 screen sizes, and 3-4 options for the amount of storage. That's a very easy decision to make. Same goes for their laptops. You get to choose ultra-thin or regular, then you get a few different options for screen size, and then you get 2 or 3 options that actually affect performance. Compare this to going to Dell, Lenovo, or HP. Whereas Apple might give you 10 options in total. The other guys will have 50 or more options to choose from.
Don't believe it's really that many, I just went to Dell's site. they have 3 lines for home use, without even getting into chrome books, they are Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware.
Inspiron has 3000, 5000, and 7000 series. Each of those has 4 different screen sizes. Each of those 4 screen sizes has on average 3 different performance/spec options. So, just from the Inspiron line, we have 3x4x3 options to choose from. That's 36 options. Alienware is a little more sane at only 16 options total, and XPS has 8 additional options.
That's a total of 60 options. And that's only looking at the "home" oriented laptops. I didn't dig down, but from the looks of it, there's even more choice in there. There is probably at least over 100 laptops to choose from when getting a Dell.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Keep believing your rhetoric. The communist ideal will never occur by the rule of law. You can have your communist utopia but not if you have to FORCE others to live by your ideals. As not all people want to live in such a system you have two choices: do as China and Russia did and try to force others to obey (create a homo sovieticus); or have a community of like-minded people and not be coercive in your approach. (In other words you don't use laws to institute your ideal world).
Should you force others to follow you then you will once again create the fascist dictatorship that you think has nothing to do with communism.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Communism doesn't work. It involves a large scale transfer of ownership of the means of production to the working class, and it's been shown that in the battle between the military and ruling class that ensues when you try to do that it all falls apart.
This folks is why I'm a Democratic Socialist. You can live however the heck you want so long as you're not causing pain and suffering to others. Trouble is the 1% will _always_ cause pain and suffering, because as you and I are diminished they are raised. It really is a Zero sum game, but for social status and political power rather than raw economics.
Nice talking points you got there though. Did you get 'em from Rush Limbaugh? You know he just got 'em from Karl Rove right?
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