[bobman0330]

I finally had time to watch this video, and I'm glad I did. Since I read Stumbling on Happiness, I've been thinking about these sorts of issues a lot.

Most of the talk was great, but I think Schwartz drew some conclusions without really thinking them through. His suggested policy at the end was to make ourselves poorer so we'd have fewer options and fewer choice problems. A much better solution is to develop techniques to avoid the perils of choice.

An example. Whenever you fire up your internet browser, you cross a threshold of nearly infinite possibilities. Are you going to read sports commentary on ESPN? Buy groceries? Read 2+2? Watch dog porn? A billion other things? You could do any of them, but very few people are paralyzed by choice, hovering over their keyboards with a look of pained indecision on their faces. Why? Because the internet is the king of organized, guided information. When I open firefox, I'm immediately looking at Yahoo!'s summary of the information I most frequently access. I have tabs open that have my most frequent sites. When I want to do something new I type a search term into my google toolbar, and if I want to wander i use StumbleUpon. All these options do two things: make it easy and choice-painless to search the unknown and give me a nice comfortable "rut" to be content in when it suits my needs. (That is, when I want weather, i click on Yahoo! Weather and don't think at all about using a different service.)

Go to amazon.com and you'll see more of the same. If you have any history at the site, you'll be bombarded with recommendations about things to look at, how other people shop, etc. Let's look at the pension plan example from a different angle. A study of Vanguard mutual funds found that by preselecting 5 of 50 options, you can boost participation by almost 10 percent!

The real point is that most people lack the ability to competently deal with all the options they are presented with. That says nothing about the objective increase in utility we can expect by better matching consumers and products through increased flexibility. What it says is that systems to help people cope are lacking in many areas. Why do you think monster.com and self-help books are so popular? IMO, it's a first step in the direction of giving people solid guidance to narrow down their fields of choice.

We've made some enormous strides in recent years that have brought an incredible degree of well-being to society. It's bizarre to me that we should now conclude, "Oh well, people have problems deciding, let's go back to when everything sucked." Understanding how a car engine works is far beyond my current capabilities. That doesn't mean I want to go back to a horse-and-buggy or that I'm experiencing some "Paradox of Car-Engine-Sophistication." It means that I pay people indirectly to understand car engines for me. The obvious solution, and one that is developing, is for me to pay people to do a lot of the heavy lifting of choosing as well.