The Paradox Of Choice (Hardcover)

No one is immune, he says. Even if someone doesn't care about clothes or restaurants, he might care very much about TV channels or books. And these are just the relatively unimportant kinds of choices. Which cookie or pair of jeans we choose doesn't really matter very much. Which health care plan or which university we choose matters quite a lot. How do different people deal with making decisions?

Schwartz analyzes from every angle how people make choices. He divides people into two groups, Maximizers and Satisficers, to describe how some people try to make the best possible choice out of an increasing number of options, and others just settle for the first choice that meets their standards. (I think he should have held out for a better choice of word than "satisficer.")

I was a bit disappointed that Schwartz dismissed the voluntary simplicity movement so quickly. They have covered this ground and found practical ways of dealing with an overabundance of choice. Instead of exploring their findings, Schwartz picked up a copy of Real Simple magazine, and found it was all about advertising. If he had picked up a copy of The Overspent American by Juliet Schor or Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin instead, he might have found some genuine discussion of simple living rather than Madison Avenue's exploitation of it.

I enjoyed the first part of The Paradox of Choice, about how we choose, but the second half, about regret and depression, seemed to drag. Fortunately, I was able to choose to skim the slow bits and move right to the more interesting conclusion, about how to become more satisfied (or "satisficed") through better decision-making.

The Paradox of Choice is a great introductory read if you have never heard of things like Opportunity Costs, Anchoring, Escalation of Commitment, etc. It does a great job of outlining various psychology realities around why choice actually creates more anxiety and depression. If you want to learn about these topics in simple, plain English, this is your book.

If you know about these topics already, have taken Psych 101 somewhere, and want to understand best practices of companies and individuals managing choice, this is going to be a disappointment. Of 11 chapters, only 1 was dedicated to how to effectively manage the barrage of choices one is faced with everyday in this society. And that chapter was pretty skimpy on specifics.

What I found lacking in this book were specific examples of how individuals effectively handle choice in a positive, proactive way. For example, what is the decision process of a satisficer (a term used in the book) for going to college or buying a car?

Furthermore, I would have liked to have seen this author talk about ways we as consumers and businesspeople can influence companies to begin to edit down the number of brands, products, and therefore choices we have to make on a regular basis.

Granted, holding this book to such a high standard might just be my desire to see this topic delved into further given the importance of it to our satisfaction with our everyday lives, but I still was expecting more. At least from a hardcover.

"As the number of choices we face increases, freedom of choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice," Schwartz intones one page from the end of his book. Maybe that's why America, the land of choice, has always limited itself to two major political parties rather than a profusion of ideologies and opinions.

If choice is good in the marketplace, surely it is good for politics. Schwartz says he "found 85 different varieties and brands of crackers." Didn't it occurred to him that if America has cracker democracy, it should also have 85 different varieties and brands of political parties? If it's good for the marketplace, why not for politics?

The key, which he passes over briefly, is found in his third chapter when he says cigarette manufacturers in the 1930s "discovered that smokers who taste-tested various cigarette brands without knowing which was which couldn't tell them apart." The result, he says, was "the practice of selling a product by associating it with a glamorous lifestyle."

It's the foundation of modern marketplace. People who are satisfied with their lives don't spend their time worrying about whether they have the most elegant, tasty, healthy or socially responsible cracker; instead, they buy and use the cracker that meets their needs. Is this possible? Well, years ago I worked with a former executive from Kraft foods who once explained that Kraft factories produced 90 percent of the macaroni and cheese sold in America. Some was sold under the Kraft name; much was sold as private brands. Yet advertising tells people there are differences. Gasoline? It's all the same, according to people who run refineries; however, look at the advertising for gasoline.

If you look at the hands producing vehicles, electronics, clothing and dozens of other consumer products, you realize much of the content comes from people who are paid pennies per hour to produce products according to ISO 9000 standards. The glamorous lifestyle choices that are so confusing comes from advertising.

Want an IBM notebook? Cisco router? Sun workstation? Hewlett-Packard printer? All are manufactured by Solectron, the largest contract manufacturer in the world. You can still buy a new GE and RCA television, though GE hasn't made a TV since 1987 and RCA doesn't exist as a company; both are brand names for Thomson, the French electronics company. In other words, you're buying the product of one manufacturer.

The key element is not the advertising glitter, nor the brand name of the product, it is whether a product meets your needs. I've driven a Jaguar, a truly magnificent car; but, my needs are best satisfied by a 1984 Volvo station wagon. In other words, my Volvo meets my needs -- my personal needs are not what advertisers say will make me happy or a car advertisers claim will raise the envy level of my neighbors.

Schwartz offers a valuable introduction to the paradoxes of choice as muddled by advertising, his observations are relevant and telling but his conclusions are hollow. He's as much a prisoner of the "glamorous lifestyle" image as anyone. It's a great book to read if you keep this in mind; think of him in terms of providing an ISO 9001:2000 product and decide whether it meets your needs.

Perhaps, though, I'm wrong in my assessment; maybe Schwartz is right. If you value intellectual integrity, read it and decide whether his ideas satisfy your experience. Bottom line? Read, then think for yourself and be satisfied with having added to your own knowledge and intelligence. Don't worry about what anyone else tells you to think.