The Axiom of Choice

[xorbie]

[ QUOTE ]
Then your definition of happiness isn't the colloquial definition. That's strictly utility.

[/ QUOTE ]

The talk adresses both happiness as a general mood as well as the specific utility we get from things we buy, which he believes is diminishing.

[xorbie]

[ QUOTE ]

Some magical amount is what economists call market equilibrium.

He has absolutely no clue, nor can he ever have a clue, as to what number of choices *I* want to have, or what number of choices *someone else* wants to have.

[/ QUOTE ]

How can you just randomly assert this? I'm fairly sure there are studies done that show quite clearly that people are happier when they have less choice, and he references many of them in his talk. So yeah, he knows, generally speaking, that people often prefer having LESS choice.

To say that market equilibrium is infalliable is absurd.

[pvn]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]


Jesus [censored] Christ.

[/ QUOTE ]

Why doesn't it?

[/ QUOTE ]

If your position is that being taxed is actually good for you, there's really no sense of arguing with you. An argument about diminishing marginal utility or helping the poor is one thing, but calling redistribution pareto-efficient because it helps the rich is beyond ridiculous.

[/ QUOTE ]

Let's say, hypothetically, you could prove 100% that having less money made you happier. How, exactly, would it be ridiculous?

[/ QUOTE ]

If this were actually true, even if it were not provable, there would be no need to use force to redistribute wealth.

[pvn]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Some magical amount is what economists call market equilibrium.

He has absolutely no clue, nor can he ever have a clue, as to what number of choices *I* want to have, or what number of choices *someone else* wants to have.

[/ QUOTE ]

How can you just randomly assert this? I'm fairly sure there are studies done that show quite clearly that people are happier when they have less choice, and he references many of them in his talk. So yeah, he knows, generally speaking, that people often prefer having LESS choice.

[/ QUOTE ]

Less than what?

[ QUOTE ]
To say that market equilibrium is infalliable is absurd.

[/ QUOTE ]

To think that some individual can outguess the market for all other people is more absurd.

[valtaherra]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Happiness has nothing to do with economics.

[/ QUOTE ]

lmao. Happiness is probably the fastest growing area in economic research today.

[/ QUOTE ]

What do *you* think happiness research has contributed to economics?

And for that matter, econometrics was the fastest growing research field in economics for a while. What do you think econometrics contributed to the economics?

[valtaherra]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Then your definition of happiness isn't the colloquial definition. That's strictly utility.

[/ QUOTE ]

The talk adresses both happiness as a general mood as well as the specific utility we get from things we buy, which he believes is diminishing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Correct, the speaker did not understand the distinction either.

[valtaherra]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Some magical amount is what economists call market equilibrium.

He has absolutely no clue, nor can he ever have a clue, as to what number of choices *I* want to have, or what number of choices *someone else* wants to have.

[/ QUOTE ]

How can you just randomly assert this? I'm fairly sure there are studies done that show quite clearly that people are happier when they have less choice, and he references many of them in his talk.



[/ QUOTE ]

How can I assert that I know what I want better than the speaker? Ummm...lol?

[ QUOTE ]
So yeah, he knows, generally speaking, that people often prefer having LESS choice.

[/ QUOTE ]

How much is the *perfect amount of choice* and how does he know we currently have *too much*?

How would one even discover how much is the perfect amount for *everyone*?

What if I like 200 salad dressing choices, but you only want 5 choices? Currently the grocer is most profitable providing 175 choices. Which one of the three of us should be able to violently enforce our preference onto everyone else?

[ QUOTE ]
To say that market equilibrium is infalliable is absurd.

[/ QUOTE ]

But a cabal of political elites deciding how much choice should be available for everyone else in the society isn't absurd. Right.

[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.

[ConstantineX]

Brilliant.

[Butso]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Happiness has nothing to do with economics.

[/ QUOTE ]

lmao. Happiness is probably the fastest growing area in economic research today.

[/ QUOTE ]

What do *you* think happiness research has contributed to economics?

And for that matter, econometrics was the fastest growing research field in economics for a while. What do you think econometrics contributed to the economics?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm no expert in "happiness" economics but I believe its main contributions are providing microeconomic foundations to existing theories and the basis for advice to policymakers.

Econometrics is used in:-
Industrial economics-widely used in competition/anti-trust cases
Government policymaking-making macroeconomic predictions
In finance-trending and modelling stock movements, etc etc

If econometrics isn't any use then why do all these institutions spend so much money hiring econometricians? Even if you believe that this applied work is infact useless then you must concede that econometrics is useful for testing economic theories and hypotheses.

[BTW, I think I know where you are coming from. There is a lot of trash that has been published in econometrics, but there is some good stuff too]-