Barry Schwartz Quotes

[W]e must decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time and energy there, letting many other opportunities pass us by.

When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases... the autonomy, control and liberation... are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects... begin to appear. As the... choices grow further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

Identity is much less a thing people "inherit" than it used to be.

Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of our consciousness.

[W]e should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.

The average American thirty-two-year-old has... worked for nine... companies. ...[J]ob-switching has become so natural that individuals that have worked for the same employer for five years are regarded with suspicion. ...[T]heir desirability or ambition is called into question ...

If some of what enables people in our society to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a Pareto improving move. Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all of this excess choice plagues us.

Americans spend more time shopping than the members of any other society. ...more often than they go to houses of worship, and Americans now have more shopping centers than high schools. ...[P]eople are shopping more now but enjoying it less.

[C]osmetic surgery is slowly shifting from being a procedure that people gossip about to being a commonplace tool for self-improvement.

There was a time when I was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. Once consequence of that... is that the phone never broke.

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy [and] the number of processes... to obtain the necessities of life. ...In the past few decades, though, that long process of simplifying and bundling economic offerings has been reversed. Increasingly, the trend moves back toward time-consuming foraging behavior...

[W]hat is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of a decision, but the subjective results.

Responsibility for medical care has landed on the... patient with a resounding thud. ...The tenor of medical practice has shifted from... the all-knowing, paternalistic doctor... to one in which the doctor arrays the possibilities... along with the likely pluses and minuses... and the patient makes the choice.

[I]ncreased choice among goods and services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of freedom that counts. ...[I]t may impair freedom by taking time and energy we'd be better off devoting to other matters.

[W]hen face with overwhelming choice, we... become "pickers,"... we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic.