Consumer Vertigo

A new wave of social critics claim that freedom's just another word for way too much to choose. Here's why they're wrong.

Virginia Postrel from the June 2005 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Schwartz also treats self-imposed limits on choice--or on shopping around--as evidence that choice doesn't really make people better off. He gripes, for instance, that "phone service has become a decision to weigh and contemplate" but, on the very next page, writes that "twenty years after phone deregulation, AT&T still has 60 percent of the market, and half of its customers pay the basic rates. Most folks don't even shop around for calling plans within the company."

This inertia is perfectly reasonable, and not at all a rejection of choice in general. It perfectly fits the conventional social science model. Thanks to competition, long-distance service is cheap. So people who don't make a lot of calls have no particular reason to switch companies. They can stick with what's familiar, ignore the rest, and still pay less than they would have 20 years ago. But those who care about phone service can shop around.

If something important is missing from the social scientist's standard model, something equally important is missing from the simplistic argument that people would be happier if we went back to the good old days of one-cut-fits-all jeans. That something is pluralism.

People are different--in size and shape, in personality, in tastes, in values. Ergonomics experts say the average body doesn't actually exist. Neither does the average mind.

Abundant choice accommodates this variation. A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture. If no one in the village shares your interests or turn of mind, you'll never have intimate friends.

Given the variety of human beings, we need abundant choice even to live as Schwartz recommends. Unlike some of Schwartz's earlier work, or his recent opinion articles, The Paradox of Choice is a book about psychology, not politics. It offers practical, personal advice. It tells readers to set standards and look for "good enough," rather than holding out for the very best conceivable choice: to "satisfice," in the jargon of social scientists, rather than "maximize."

When you satisfice, you don't let an impossible quest for the perfect destroy your enjoyment of the good. You look for a red cotton crewneck sweater that fits well and costs less than $50. When you find one, you buy it. You don't run all over town trying to find a better, or cheaper, sweater. You don't lie awake at night wondering if your sweater is the best of all sweaters. Your purchase is rational in the normal, colloquial sense of the word but not necessarily in the social science meaning. (Some social scientists argue that satisficing is, in fact, rational in the narrow sense because it includes all the costs of the search.)

As long as you want something average, satisficing doesn't require much variety. The old Holiday Inn slogan, "The Best Surprise Is No Surprise," is all you need--minimum standards of not-bad quality, the old mass-market, one-size-fits-all formula. But nobody is average all the time. Maybe you're looking for that red cotton sweater because even the softest wool makes your hypersensitive skin itch. You'd be much worse off in a world where sweaters only came in wool, while many other people, those with "normal" skin, would be perfectly happy. They might even argue that shoppers were better off with fewer fiber choices.

Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings. Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

Schwartz writes that "the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is." To the contrary, only the proliferation of choice gives us the opportunity to make the decisions we individually deem most important.

Of course, the idea that meaningful choice means actively contemplating every alternative isn't unique to anti-choice critics. Libertarians sometimes talk as though the act of choosing is a good in and of itself and treat any limitation on choice as some kind of weakness, irrationality, or tyranny. Yet free individuals voluntarily limit their options all the time. They decide to be vegan, to write strictly metered poetry, to wear natural fibers, to date born-again Christians, to buy Japanese cars. They happily shop at boutiques, use blogs to guide their reading, and hire interior designers. They let expert gatekeepers narrow down their alternatives.

These choices about what and how to choose are not only voluntary but meaningful. They help define who we are. And they preserve the essential value of abundant choice. Most people, most of the time, are less interested in choice per se than they are in the benefits of variety. They want to find what truly suits them.

Hiring an interior designer or wedding consultant is not, as The Washington Post's Mallaby suggests, a way of "deliberately avoiding choice." To
the contrary, these specialists are valuable because they don't simply limit the number of options. They limit those options to ones you're likely to like. They do not hand you a one-size-fits-all solution � la Social Security. Unlike the Schwartz prescription for "less choice" overall, these gatekeepers do not reduce your chance of finding what's right for you. They increase it.

At the heart of the anti-choice argument is a false dichotomy: We can have a narrow range of standardized choices, or we can live with options that are infinite, dizzying, and always open.

Schwartz treats commitment as the opposite of choice rather than its complement. By this logic, a market without contracts is freer than one in which contracts are enforced. After all, what if I sell you my car and then change my mind and want it back?