The Surprising Origins of Modern Freedom
Sophia Rosenfeld joins Nick Gillespie to discuss how personal choice became central to modern ideas of freedom and why that shift carries political, cultural, and psychological consequences.
Today's guest is University of Pennsylvania historian Sophia Rosenfeld, the author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.
Her book explores why we've come to basically equate having more personal choices with having more freedom. She stresses it wasn't always this way—in the past, freedom was often defined as the ability to act in the way God wanted you to act, or to overcome base urges, to be more angel than beast.
Rosenfeld talks about how the Reformation, which enshrined a right to choose among faiths, and the rise of shopping, which allowed us to choose among many products, worked to change all that, even up to our current day, where rhetoric about choice still dominates many political and economic arguments.
0:00—Intro
1:15—Main arguments from The Age of Choice
4:03—Earlier conceptions of freedom
7:37—The Reformation and religious freedom
10:32—Capitalism and market freedom
15:37—Consumer choice and femininity
20:00—Choice as freedom in the 20th century
26:07—Abortion rights and the choice debate
31:26—Choices vs. mandates
36:50—Overwhelmed by choice
Upcoming Reason Events
The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15
The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16
Today's Sponsor
Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.
______________________________________________________________________________
Transcript
This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Give me a quick précis of the book's argument.
Sophia Rosenfeld: Sure, I'm happy to do that. I think choice is one of those things we do tend to equate, as you've just suggested, sort of automatically with freedom. It's sort of the water we swim in: more choice is better, more opportunities for choice is better than less. And I'm not here to really dispute that exactly, but I'm interested in both the good and bad things it's brought us, and I'm also interested in how that happened.
Because actually, what's perhaps surprising to people is that freedom hasn't always been conceptualized as a matter of choice, and choice hasn't been conceptualized as what brings us freedom. So the story that I tell in the book is really about two things. It's about how choice came to proliferate so that we pick things in really disparate areas of life—ranging from political candidates to breakfast cereals to who we want to marry. We pick in all sorts of categories that would have seemed strange to people—still does to people in some parts of the globe today—and certainly would have to almost everyone around the globe in an earlier moment, a few hundred years ago.
So I'm interested in how that happened, and then I'm interested in how it came to be understood as freedom—why freedom became a matter of choice. Because there's nothing actually obvious about it, though to us it sometimes seems that way.
The book traces a whole series of social practices that people engaged in—things they did, essentially. How did people start picking things in stores? How did they come to think of ideas or even religious notions as something one could select from a menu of options? And it goes all the way up—it starts really in the Reformation and in the first Age of Empire—but it takes us all the way to the 20th century and the invention of whole sciences of choice to study why we're choice makers.
Let's run through all of these. Also the other thing that the book focused on in a way that is fascinating is the way that choice often became identified as feminine—a part of being female—and also often times kind of depreciating choice because it's something women would be dazzled or overwhelmed by too many choices in front of them, in consumer goods. There's a long history, certainly in European, continental, and Anglo studies, of shopkeepers are sad little men who are somehow not quite manly in the way that martial virtues are. Choice gets identified with femininity in various ways. We'll get to that.
First, let's talk about before the modern era. Before the Reformation, freedom was not about choice—or to the extent that it was, it was about being able to make the right moral choice. Partly when I was reading this book, I think it was back in the '80s, but at some point 7-Eleven stores brought in soda fountains that had both Coke and Pepsi products. They had a huge campaign: "Freedom of choice," like we celebrate choice, choice, choice. That's freedom—being able to have Mountain Dew and Coca-Cola without going to two separate stores.
But in this period when we're talking about Hercules' choice or the pre-modern definition of freedom—what was Hercules' choice, and what does that say about earlier conceptions of freedom?
Right. If you were a person living in the 17th or 18th century in Western Europe, or even in the burgeoning United States, you probably would have been familiar with this idea of Hercules' choice. It's allegorized everywhere, from poetry to opera. John Adams proposed it for the seal of the new United States. It was harmonized with Christian teachings; so they went well together.
The idea was this: Hercules was torn. He was torn between doing the right thing—virtue—or the opposite, turning toward vice. And often in a painting, you see his body kind of torqued. He can't quite decide which way. But he always, in the end, goes toward virtue—which is doing not what is hedonistic, not recognizing his hedonistic pleasures, but doing what was right morally, what was right for his family, what was right for his community. In the end, Hercules always makes the right choice. And so he became free—by himself, of his own volition— doing what was right.
And in that sense, he becomes free because he triumphs over his bodily urges or more base impulses?
He triumphs over his passions, his base impulses. He goes toward the moral, but as his own person. He isn't compelled to be moral; but realizes it's important for him to do the right thing.
So you're free to the extent that you do what God expects of you—or morality—which is identified at that point, ironically, since it's Hercules, and he's a pre-Christian myth figure. But if you're doing what a Christian God tells you to do, which is to be more of an angel and less of a beast, you have achieved freedom.
Absolutely. So this could be all these things harmonized: what God wanted you to do, what your family wanted you to do, what your community wanted you to do— lined up. And the idea is—of course, Hercules is a man; this is only allegorical—but he's picking between two women as virtue and vice.
So it's really imagined as a kind of manly freedom too.
It's a kind of vision of thinking of others before oneself—not giving into based temptation, but being free to be the upstanding person that you're supposed to be. This is a really important early modern trope, and it never entirely goes away, of course. But it's not the dominant way we think of freedom today.
Let's talk about that. Obviously, there are a lot of things that drive the shift from that kind of freedom to a freedom which is identified with increasing choice in all areas of human activity. But a big part of it—you mentioned this briefly in passing—is the Reformation, or the idea of religious freedom and being able to choose among different ways of, for the most part, it's different ways of worshiping the Christian God. How does the Reformation help start to create a shift in how we understand freedom?
Right. So one way to tell this story would be to see just simply capitalism taking over everything, and everything just becomes a marketplace. Certainly that's an important part of the story, but I don't think it's the whole story. I think the other point of origin—the less obvious one—may be the Reformation, for two reasons.
First, the Reformation sort of inadvertently ends up creating pluralism in the religious sphere, for Protestants especially. There are so many sects by the end of the 16th and 17th centuries that, in order for people to live together, they have to essentially accept—even though nobody really wanted to—the idea that Lutherans are going to need to live near Methodists, who are going to live near Calvinists, etc.
And it is worth talking about how, of course, none of them were saying, "Oh, and we should put up with Catholics."
No. Absolutely not.
Catholics were not particularly interested in putting up with—
—far from it. This is a kind of inadvertent effect of the Reformation. Everybody thought they had the right answer. But over time—I'm talking to you from Philadelphia, my current city—and if you were in Philadelphia, a place of religious toleration in the 18th century, on a Sunday morning you could have heard sermons by something like 12 or 15 different kinds of Christians. That doesn't even include Jews, or potentially Native Americans and other kinds of religious content.
I think in the colonial period, probably the only place—and I think it was more in rhetoric than in reality—but Providence, Rhode Island, coming out of Roger Williams' area, he stubbornly agreed that Jews, Catholics, and Muhammadans could live there in equal standing. But certainly not in most of the colonies.
One thing you see that's really surprising is that tourists who come to Philadelphia in the 18th century will try out different churches on a Sunday morning. They'll write things like, "Heard the African Methodists at 10—very interesting sermon. Enjoyed the Baptists even more at 11." That's odd. But it's an entertainment of sorts, and it's intellectual entertainment. Those become secular lectures and things—-
Yes. And that does mirror the kind of burgeoning rise of what we now call capitalism, where there's more of a marketplace in most goods and services. Right. Suddenly, there's a religious marketplace, which may or may not anticipate— but I guess it develops at the same time as a new economic system that increases or proliferates choice.
Talk a little about how capitalism does that. And if you could—because he's got a ridiculous name, but it's also fascinating—this is a history book, but a great character: Christopher Koch. He kind of exemplifies this, right?
I will just say this to finish on the religious topic, because I don't want to suggest that people picked religions the same way they pick toothpaste or something. I mean, obviously, there are some differences.
I think we do that now.
Maybe we do. But these are kind of parallel stories that eventually merge rather than all being the same thing. Freedom of conscience—this other great Protestant idea—is very important to the idea of selecting what one believes.
To get to the other side of this story—that's the religious strain—at the same time, something else is happening first in Europe and it spreads to the New World. Latin America as well as North America. That's the rise of stores and shopping.
Different from a marketplace. A marketplace— people have always bought things, but you went to a market mainly to provision yourself. You got what you needed, someone handed it to you, and there was a transaction.
But with the rise of auction houses first—which is where Mr. Koch comes into play—and fixed-location stores shortly after came these new practices of displaying the goods and letting people do what we now call browsing, now. The word shopping itself is a neologism. It's a new word in the 18th century. It starts to show up in a kind of fashionable term by the late 18th century, and it means something very specific that we now do all the time—you do it even when browsing on your computer, which is: looking at the options, deciding which ones match your preferences, and then engaging in a transactional sale.
Mr. Koch is this figure who starts an auction house in the early 18th-century in London, and he's kind of a wizard of marketing. It's not that auctions are brand new—they have auctions in antiquity—but he decides he can turn auctions into theater, into entertainment. Women and men are both invited to come on special hours to look at the household contents of people, then to be tempted, and come back and make selections. He sets up what I would call a visual menu.
This happens again in stores a little later, when cottons start arriving from India—patterned cottons, beautiful fabrics—they're available at a low enough price point that ordinary people, not the kind they would be buying fine silks, can walk in and say, "I do love blue better than red," or "Checks are more appealing to me than stripes." And there's no moral implication around that choice. One of the things that starts to happen is that these are largely value-neutral choices. It's not Hercules' choice—the good and the bad—it's two things, and I like one of them better than the other for reasons I can't really explain. I'm going to take the one I like.
And does this also start to degrade—in terms of the moral choice—this is part of a lot of different processes, but it starts undermining a rigid class structure or it starts to challenge sumptuary laws, to some degree, where only certain people could afford certain fabrics, and there might have been laws saying only certain types of people could wear specific types of clothing, etc.
Suddenly, when things become more available to more people, it gets confusing, right?
Absolutely. At first, there's a kind of confusion. People start saying, "What if servants start dressing like masters? We can't tell if someone's in a floral dress, who they are." That has a lot to do with urbanization, too.
Right.
People don't know each other necessarily. That arises as well. But an interesting thing happens, if what you're suggesting is true—there's a kind of deregulation that allows anybody who meets the purchase price to buy something. But then, new forms of regulation start to emerge. I just want to emphasize: it's like taste.
Yeah. Both social customs and laws and things like that— The book is excellent in driving home the point that even when it seems as if we have unlimited choice, we're always experiencing bounded choices—by things like taste, and other kinds of social pressures, and sometimes legal ones.
Could you talk a bit about how did consumer choice get so heavily identified with women? There's a whole subgenre in English writing as well as colonial American writing—and it persists in novels—of women being particularly interested in choosing among novel goods and then somehow being seen as suspect. Women more than men. It happens to men, but usually as they approach femininity, get dazzled by too many choices.
Why did consumer choice and the female sex get conjoined?
It's a really interesting question, isn't it? How did choice, at least initially, get so associated with women? I think it goes back to that term shopping. The first shoppers are imagined to be women—they're women with leisure time. They're middle class or higher-status women who, if you've read a Jane Austen novel you know, do things like go out, for their entertainment, in an afternoon and look at hats or ribbons in one of these new kinds of stores.
They're both extremely modern because they're doing this modern thing, but they're also chastised for it because it looks really lightweight, morally unserious—especially in light of, say, Hercules' choice. If you're thinking of that as manly choices. These are choices about things like ribbons, or people to dance with, or boyfriends - as we call them now.
For a long time they taint this kind of choice.
But an interesting thing happens in the 19th century. This kind of value-neutral choice starts to shift directions and becomes something associated also with men. Then women having more choices in this domain becomes aspirational. It's at the roots of feminism. For someone like John Stuart Mill—even the idea of the secret ballot. Surprisingly Mill, the great champion of choice, freedom, and liberal notions in the 19th century, is really afraid of voting that he thinks will look too much like shopping.
When you're isolated and you make a decision based on your personal preferences, he says the only manly kind of voting is much more like Hercules' choice.
It's public, it's about the general good, it's done in concert with others. It's only in the late 19th century that the feminized version of choice becomes universal enough that it becomes the standard for things like suffrage and human rights. Then women want it too. Women say, "We've always known how to choose things. Why can't we choose political candidates? Why can't we choose occupations?"
To start bringing it into the 20th century—when you're talking about the 19th century—how does the idea of choice as freedom start to fill in for things like abolition as well as feminist equality before the law?
Are there particular moments where people say, "I, myself, as an African chattel slave, I should have the same choice to choose among things as a white citizen or somebody in the marketplace"? In the same way that when I go to the market to buy something I'm choosing among competing goods—are there moments where— explicitly—the idea of having more individual choices becomes linked to freedom in the modern sense?
Absolutely. You mentioned abolitionism—I think that's one of the starting points. It's developing in the 19th century, but it's not the strongest strain yet. In the 20th century, I think two things happened that are really important here.
One is the development I mentioned earlier—the sciences of choice that get us to things like psychology—-people are choosers, and economics. Again, turns towards consumption rather than production as the central thing. Homo economicus is somebody who is buying.
Oh, and for the Reason audience, at least, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises talked about praxeology and humans as the choosing animal. That's expressly what defines us as a species.
Absolutely—that's the culmination. That's a perfect example. First, there's these social sciences that reimagine humans as choosers. Ordinary people participate in this every time they do everything from respond to advertising, or surveys, or go to a psychologist's or psychiatrist's office. So that's one thing that happened.
I think around the time of the Second World War is a really critical moment when the Allied Powers, and especially the United States, start to say that what makes the U.S. and its allies different from communists or fascists is this notion of freedom as choice—both in the commercial sphere and in the political sphere.
By the time you get the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is 1948, I think it's striking. People often say it's just kind of the same as the Rights of Man of the 18th century rewritten in the 20th century. But it's not, because choice isn't there in the original ones, and the reframing in the 20th century as choice in religion, choice in education, choice in spouse, choice in the political sphere—all of these become kind of essential human rights principles.
A lot of other movements, including feminism, kind of capitalize on that and say, "what about us?" But the basic framework is, I think, set by the Second World War, and the key thing here is the way the political and the economic are fused in that model.
This is well done in the book—the discussion of this creates a massive amount of anxiety across every possible level of society. And it's interesting to think about the Declaration of Human Rights—or rather, that foregrounding of choice—but then all of the great sciences coming out of the 19th century seem to be… which are born out of a liberal society where people are free to experiment and do different things.
But if it's Marx, Darwin, and Freud, they're all kind of saying that, well, it appears that we have choice, but we don't. We're designed by economics. We're just designed by our psychology or our biology to—you know—we don't really have much choice at all.
And that gets compounded whenI think a lot about books like The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard in the '50s, where he's talking about how advertisers are working with psychologists to kind of make people in marketplaces think they're choosing. But in fact, they're going to buy the red car, they're going to buy the new refrigerator, and you have no say in it.
Can you talk a little bit about how the anxiety that is introduced by the idea that people have more choice, but then also this shadow idea that choice is always kind of fake, and we're actually—we're scamming people by telling them that they have choice?
Right. There are critiques all along, and they come from the right and the left. It's not like there's a single politics that dictates this model. On one side people are saying, "What does it mean to give people a choice if they don't have the means to exercise them?" So these people— you have choice in profession, you have choice in education, and nobody has any means to say, get the education presented. What kind of choice is that? So that's one kind of illusion.
And the other is what you're suggesting, which might be equally as important: aren't all these choices sort of inconsequential, and therefore give you the illusion of freedom when you have very little? Either because you're steered by various external factors, or because the choices don't really matter that much. You go to the supermarket, and there are 50 kinds of shampoo, and you spend 50 minutes trying to figure out which one you want—but they're probably all the same.
And we're in a bizarre moment of kind of horseshoe theory, where someone like Bernie Sanders said a few years ago that we don't need 23 flavors of deodorant or 50 types of sneakers. And then you hear someone like Tucker Carlson, now, saying the same thing—that being able to buy more cheap crap from China on Amazon is not a meaningful choice.
That's interesting. Yeah.
Yeah. Part of what we talk about when we think about choice—and the sections in the book on this are phenomenal to read—the genealogy of how abortion rights became codified as reproductive choice. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because that brings us closer to the present day.
You write that when abortion laws were being—or the rhetorical arguments over abortion, particularly as Roe v. Wade was starting to come online and right after—that within feminist organizations, there was a discussion of, "do we talk about this in terms of choice or not?"
Could you just kind of summarize that and explain how that fits into this larger set of issues that you're engaged in?
Yeah, absolutely. I had been thinking about the debates about choice because, as I was writing the book, we were having national conversations about abortion rights—50 years after Roe v. Wade.
What really struck me was that in the 1970s, right after Roe v. Wade was decided, the mainstream feminist organizations like NOW and Planned Parenthood were looking for a way to mainstream the decision—to make abortion less of a contentious issue. They think, "should we try equality? No, that's got issues around it. Should we try population control?" That now seems crazy to us, but that was one of the issues possible. "Healthcare?" That is what the British go with.
They decide against that.
A number of the organizations come to the conclusion that the one thing that all Americans across the political spectrum agree upon is the value of choice. As you just said, choices really run across left-right lines, pretty fully. So it's not a crazy idea to say, "What if we just say, 'look, you don't have to like abortion. You don't have to have an abortion if you don't want one. We're just increasing the menu. We're giving people one more option as a legal possibility. Everybody can select what's in their best interest.'" I think this was really a solution to a problem.
Well, it didn't work out, obviously, quite that way.
Although, it's fascinating that in the wake of Roe being overturned and decisions being put back to the states, that a number of states that were expected to reinstate 19th-century measures against abortion—I'm thinking Kansas and Ohio.
They were like, "Hey you know what, we're not going back. We're actually going to instantiate liberal, in contemporary terms, liberal abortion laws.
It is fascinating. The attack from the left is easier to understand as the ones saying, "What's a choice if there are no doctors and I don't have money to pay for this?" That's a classic version.
But the attack from the right went back to a Hercules' choice model, and said, "the right to life is a consequential moral decision, you're just offering up consumer options."
Right. I used to see the bumper sticker quite frequently: "It's a child, not a choice."
Exactly.
It's interesting—it also kind of concedes the fact that that the choice rhetoric won and was very useful. It's been adopted to the extent that school choice is more of a right-wing phenomenon.
It employs the same logic—that giving parents and children more choices on a menu of options—we will give you the money, the voucher, or public funding to make "meaningful" choices—because you're actually exercise your option.
Right. In some ways, those women's organizations in the '70s were prescient. They figured choice is an easy sell for Americans. It's an easy sell in a lot of the world.
Just to simply say—people like reproductive choice on one side, school choice on the other. They're fighting about what should be chosen, but not about choice itself. And when you say that, the reaction in Kansas and other places has been really interesting because… people will argue against abortion, but they won't necessarily want to give up on the idea that the choice should be out there.
So they might say, "I don't actually believe abortion is a good thing." On the other hand: "Do I really want to tell everybody that they can't have it under any circumstances?" A lot of people have said no.
I think, in a way, choice seems like a not-very-successful way to sell the public on an idea, but it does continue to have a kind of resonance that makes it an effective political tool. And you saw during COVID-19, for instance, the great feminist expression my body, my choice being appropriated by people who were protesting masking or vaccine mandates—which was a very unexpected twist.
Well, it seems that Americans like choice rather than mandates, right? And this kind of goes across political lines. It's fascinating—this is slightly off-topic—but prior to COVID-19, Pew [Research] ran a survey in the early 2010s asking people across political lines whether they were pro- or anti-vaccine mandates, or vaccines in general.
And being anti-vaccine was more of a left-wing cause in the early 2010s. Now it has become very hard-coded right—even if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a liberal Democrat and is now in the Trump administration. It's kind of fascinating. But that idea of, "I don't want to make that choice, but I want to have the possibility of opting out"
Right. I do think that's a kind of residual instinct that people have: choice is good.
I sometimes worry, though, that there's a difference between a choice you can make based on your own preferences—that it only affects you. You know, "I choose to do this; it makes no difference to your life."
But there are other kinds of choices. Vaccination, for instance—if rates of vaccination get too low, it affects everybody's kids, right? Because that's how we…
It's fascinating. There are arguments that because the COVID-19 vaccine does not stop the spread of the disease - but it weakens it for the person who takes it- it's categorically different from, say, the measles vaccine.
Right, but let's use measles as an example…
Well, I was going to say that somebody like RFK, who was very anti–measles vaccine, that was his first big foray into public discussion about vaccines.
He says that COVID-19 vaccine mandates are bad, but he's had to admit that measles vaccine mandates actually serve a public function. I think he was eating a little bit of crow there.
He did. Yeah.
You write toward the end of the book that choice—whether about babies, or baubles, or beliefs—should be a means, not an end unto itself. Can you explain how does that play into a larger question about: What are the limits of talking about choice as freedom? And complicating the easy equation of saying that more choice means we're more free?
Your example of measles vaccines actually would work there to that point.
I think if you want to think of sort of three shifts, there's the Hercules' choice—the right thing or the wrong thing. There's a kind of value-neutral choice emerging, which is to say, what I like better. And then there's one where the value itself becomes the choice—just having a choice, itself, is what matters.
And many times—of course, I'm not a critic, per se, of choice—I think choice is… you know, nobody wants to be coerced on most fronts. But if choice is always the highest value, we sometimes lose track of what we're choosing and why.
This would be a case, for instance, if you start saying, "my body, myself" and you're talking about measles vaccines—because you feel the most important thing is getting to do what you want to do.
A certain kind of selfishness emerges, where you've lost track of why you're choosing what you're choosing.
And there are other examples one could point to, too where sometimes, choice can be liberating. But choice isn't always liberating. Some kinds of choices are, as you said, illusory—or they can trap you in various ways and prevent us from thinking: "What's in our common interest here? What would be the best-case scenario?"
So I'm more interested in people having a kind of self-reflexiveness about choice than I am in telling people, "These are the good choices, and these are bad ones"
You say at the end that too much of our history—you talk about behavioral economics and whatnot—seeks to explain a kind of path dependency: "OK, these choices were made at a particular time, and that's how we arrived at the current moment. And it kind of makes sense, whether it's good or bad…"
But it would be good to get outside of that and to think in more—and I'm not accusing you of being a utopian in a dark sense—just what if we're actually starting over when talking about some set of activities or about what society might look like?
I don't like being called a bit of a utopian. Because I'm not asking people to set policy this way, as much as to rethink some of the things we take to be absolutely natural and ordinary.
I mean certainly. In a weird way, over the past 30 years—of thinking about my professional life—the idea of demystifying "nature" is— For God's sake we need to be doing that all of the time. We have been, as a society. So, that's very good.
You may be the wrong person to ask for this, but when you think about the choices that all of us are making on a given day…just because we have more things that we're doing in a given day.
I have children who have grown up in a world where they just start making more choices. If they're turning on a TV or a phone, you go from three channels, to 30 channels, to an infinite number of effective channels on the internet and beyond.
What are the ways that we might become better—you were talking about being self-reflexive about choice—but give us a tip you can give us as we end this conversation…
So it's true—we're all a little overwhelmed with choice at the moment.
There was an interesting literature, some of it by people in things like behavioral economics and marketing saying, "Nobody really wants to go on Amazon and, you know, you need a new toaster. You really don't want to see 500 toasters. You really would probably prefer to have three different ones at three different prices and you just pick."
That literature, I know, in social psychology or behavioral psychology, is highly contested. But one thing that is true is that Amazon is now sharing influencer picks with you. So maybe you follow an influencer, and they say, "Here are five great toasters," instead of wading through an infinite number.
Wirecutter or something, right?
We look now to both algorithms and all kinds of consultants to help us with every kind of choice—if we can afford to. Everything from a personal shopper or a decorator to a financial planner, to an algorithm that says, "You liked this movie? You might like this other one of the 800 we're offering you."
We can use those. Of course, they tend to reinforce, they don't allow you to really dip into new things. They sort of reinforce what you already done but I think more important is to think about when choice is really valuable to you and when it isn't. Not all choices matter. Some matter a lot.
Think long and hard about, say, who you want to spend the rest of your life with, right? But back to those toasters—doing hours of research on 500 toasters, trying to figure out the best deal by checking every possible site and things—it's a source of frustration, anxiety…
Yeah—obsessive-compulsive is like, is a 4.2-star rating really better than a 4.4? Or whatever…
You spend half the evening looking through the options on Netflix before you can pick what your family's gonna watch because you've been…
That has just shifted the family drama from cruising Blockbuster for a movie everybody will watch.
Now we do it in the living room.
Amazon even tries to mimic the experience because you have baskets— for instance — you put things into them, then you go to a checkout.
You sort of mimicked what those 18th-century shoppers were doing when they first learned to make choices.
It was novel then—now we just have electronic versions.
But I do think we could think more—both as a society - that's maybe my utopian part - but also on a personal level: When is choice meaningful? When is it actually preferable to say, "Eat the dinner that's being made. Don't think about, 'Does everybody at the table want something different?' or 'What would everybody prefer?'"
We don't add to our happiness—and I don't think we even really add to our freedom—in those actions.
And it might make the choices that matter easier to deal with if we didn't think we were making fifty a day.
That's great. OK, we're going to leave it there. I've been talking with Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.
Sophia, thanks so much for talking to Reason.
Thank you—it's been a pleasure.
- Producer: Paul Alexander
- Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
