----- Original Message ----- From: "Sampo Syreeni" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 6:33 PM
Subject: [armchair] Re: Too many choices Schwartz's Parade article does not provide enough information for analysis, but is this a chicken and the egg problem? Perhaps unhappy or clinically depressed people are unable to make decisions, they are overwhelmed by even limited choices. This seems to me the more likely scenario. Based on personal experience, the problems seems to be one of dissatisfaction with the lack of any significant difference between choices. Using Schwartz's example, I don't believe there are 40 distinct and separable toothpastes on the market nor 80 different painkillers. Different brands of essentially the same product do not present a real choice. However, dissatisfaction is not the same thing as being unhappy or clinically depressed. Schwartz also claims clinical depression is 10 times more prevalent in 2000 than 1900, given the relatively primitive state of medical care in 1900 not to mention psychology or psychiatry, Freud started publishing in the late 1890's, Jung well after that, I doubt there are any reliable data on clinical depression rates in 1900 or that the term has the same meaning now vs. 1900. I believe if there is a link between unhappiness and the increase in our choices it is indirect, rather it is due to the increased information requirements necessitated by the number of choices which adds to a general information overload, yet the quantity and variety of information sources makes it difficult to find reliable sources of information, an "unhappy" situation. I find Schwartz's comments about accepting "good enough" or as he calls it in his book's title "Satisficing", I believe Tyler Cowan has also addressed satisficing in one of his articles. I generally like the concept but I am unsure if it is different from or is just optimization with addition constraints, i.e. time perhaps. I completely disagree with his closing comment that overabundance of choice is a significant cause of unhappiness. That calls to mind a description, I forget where I read it, of shopping in the old communist Russia as,something to the effect, that consumers have the freedom from having to make choices. Ron Baty [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 2004-01-06, Fred Foldvary uttered: >> He says that as the number of choices we have grows (for products) we >> become less happy, > >Is he just guessing, or is there evidence for this? I seem to have heard of some controlled experiments to this effect, in the psychological literature, so I think there might be a small grain of truth to the claim. (As usual, no cite. Take the grain of truth with a grain of salt.) But I also think the problem is elsewhere. Basically, lots of choices are only a problem when you habitually look back, mull over the opportunity cost, and start to hesitate with choice because costs are involved. That's a sure sign of a mindset where people refuse to understand that choices are by definition about not having it both ways. Some of the problem also comes from not acknowledging that sunk costs are indeed sunk, and that that's just fine. >From this perspective the idea that lots of choices are bad is simply a symptom of people's unwillingness to conceive of choice the way orthodox economics does. But what really makes me wonder is why these ideas are becoming so commonplace right now. Have people in fact been more economically savvy in the past, or what? And if they have, why the change? (It shouldn't come as a surprise that, as a libertarian, I'm prone to blaming creeping socialism for these sorts of things. ;) -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
