Choice

A recent book, The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, argues that, as choices proliferate, people are less satisfied overall. He says that we would be better off and more satisfied if we had fewer choices. I think his analysis is fairly shallow and he misses the mark. A lot of the book is "filler" which one has come to expect from a best seller. This book claims to have been a "Business Week Top Ten Book of the Year." His book is long on pseudo-psychological psycho-babble and short on the analysis of social conditions such as advertising which distort the whole process of choosing and turn many choices into phony or false choices which benefit only the seller, not really the consumer.

A social system such as preferensism which is an outgrowth of social choice is predicated on the assumption that increased freedom is associated with increased choices, and, I would argue, that increased choices are increasingly satisfying provided that the choices are real and not distorted by advertising. In addition, there are methods and techniques (hardly mentioned by Barry Schwartz) for dealing with what might seem like a bewidering array of choices. For example, before I purchase a CD, I read reviews (hopefully more than one) to see what the critics have to say about the music. I know from experience that I'm particularly interested in only one genre of music so that eliminates a large number of choices that I don't even have to consider right there. Consumer Reports as well as a number of online services such as epinions rate and rank different products, and there are price comparison wesites such as shopping.com that do price comparisons.

Therefore, I feel there are intelligent ways of making a decision as to which product or service one wishes to consume which make the process rewarding if not enjoyable. The only depressing thing to me is having my programming interrupted by TV and radio advertising. That, not the number of choices available, is what is truly depressing. Schwartz walks into a store and notes that there are "285 varieties of cookies," "40 options for toothpaste" etc. Unfortunately, he never gets beyond a rather psychological analysis as to why there are such a bewildering number of options and are any of the options any good? I have been on a quest to find plain white toothpaste like used to be on store shelves when each manufacturer was represented by only one variety of toothpaste. Although there are 40 varieties of toothpaste, I have not been able to locate on the store shelves just plain white toothpaste. The question is why? I think the answer has to do with (of all things) the marketing clout of the large toothpaste producing corporations. Crest and Colgate are the two largest and they have the most varieties of toothpaste taking up the most shelf space real estate in the supermarket. Inside the boxes, which tout the different varieties, the toothpaste is remarkably similar. For the most part it is all an aqua color which leads me to believe that the only significant difference among the different varieties is the packaging.

Now the supermarket will not devote a large amount of shelf space to just one variety of toothpaste. For a company to dominate the supermarket shelves, they have to produce what seemingly is a large number of different kinds of toothpaste. The only problem is they're not really all that different. So these choices are false choices. They're not really giving consumers a large number of choices at all, just attempting to dominate supermarket real estate, and evidently, the supermarkets are happy to go along with this deception.

Another problem in the "bewildering array of choices" that Schawarz notices is that in many cases hardly any of them are of high quality. I've noticed time and again a product, that I had been a regular purchaser of because I really liked the product, disappearing from store shelves only to be replaced by a similar but less desirable product. Why do you suppose this is and how does this affect Schwartz' rather depressing analysis that more choices produce less satisfaction? My analysis is that the store manager only wants to devote shelf space to products for which there are the highest profit margins. Therefore, a lower quality product which costs less to produce may have a higher profit margin than a high quality product whose ingredients cost more. Such a product may have a lower profit margin. And through advertising, corporations can increase demand for low quality products which have high profit margins. This is why independent testing and rating agencies are so important. Expert opinion and criticism can defeat the purpose of advertising which is to increase corporate profit margins, not to educate or inform the consumer, let alone provide him or her with a quality product.

Companies which put out a high quality product can take market share from companies who have established a "brand" but continue to market the lowest quality the consumer will buy. Take coffee, for instance. The coffee industry has known for years that there are two kinds of coffee beans: the low quality and cheaper Robustico and the higher quality and more expensive Arabica. Naturally they sold the lower quality coffee and made hefty profits for years. Then along came Starbucks and their goal was to deliver a superior product. They, therefore, used the higher quality and more expensive ingredients. Their profit margin per cup might have been lower, but they gained enormous market share because consumers, once they had been exposed to a superior product, came to be willing to spend more to get an excellent cup of coffee rather than the swill they had been used to. The same thing could be said for bread. People who were fortunate enough to travel to Europe where the quality of bread and coffee was superior saw the opportunity for emulating those operations and establishing high quality niche markets.

So I think Mr. Schwarz totally misses the mark. Instead of an analysis of the false choices that are so depressing, he tells us that more choice in general is depressing. His agent must have told him to include the psycho-babble in order to sell books. But it's basically bullshit. Most people that are at all sophisticated or experienced make choices based on their experience and rely on expert opinions from knowledgable sources. Smart people today can avail themselves of resources widely available on the web to make choices. There are quality comparison sites and price comparison sites. Instead of giving an intelligent method for culling the bad choices and narrrowing down to the good quality choices, Mr. Schwarz just says that we should have fewer choices in general and then we would be better off. I disagree. I think we are better off when we have an increasing number of high quality choices.

In a society based on preferensism, choice is fundamental. A citizen has to make choices which are both political and economic in nature. The educational system in any society needs to teach people how to make intelligent choices. For instance, in a political system in which all candidates for the Senate are voted on by all voters instead of just voting on a district by district basis, obviously there would be many more choices to consider than if one were just voting for one senator from one district. Such a system could still make sense and increase the freedom of each citizen if citizens allowed themselves to be guided in making choices the way they are guided by critics and experts in making consumer choices. A party or publication might make recommendations based on their way of thinking and each voter might take the recommendations of the party or publication they felt an affinity with.

There are other ways to make choice manageable in a preferensist society or one based on individual and social choice. A good review of some of these ideas can be found here.