Barry Schwartz Quotes

We almost have an unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. ...It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.

Agonizing over whether your love is "the real thing" or your sexual relationship above or below par, and wondering whether you could have done better is a prescription for misery. Knowing that you've made a decision choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it.

We are blessed... with the technology which enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet... We have to make a decision again and again... about whether we should or shouldn't be working. ...and even if they're all shut off, every minute... we are asking ourselves, "Should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" And even if the answer... is no, it's... going to make your experience... different...

I am not suggesting that deregulation and competition in the telephone and power industries are bad things. ...But the problem is that state regulators aren't there anymore to make sure customers don't get ripped off. ...[E]ven if you keep what you've always had, you may end up paying substantially more ...

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.

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.

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.

[In] the world we used to live in... there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice, and the world we now live in looks like [The Ten Commandments Do-It-Yourself Kit]. Is this good news or bad news? [T]he answer is both.

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

A large array of options may discourage customers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making the decision. ...[T]hinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.

There is in American society, not only the the American society but more here than anywhere else, what I have come to call the official syllogism and this is a set of assumptions that we have about well-being and about how society should be organized that runs so deep that I think we don't realize we make them. And the only time you start to notice that you make them is when you can start to accumulate evidence that they are wrong. So what is this official syllogism? First, we all think that the more freedom people have, the more welfare they have. How could you think otherwise? This is [a] no-brainer. What argument could you make to suggest that there is anything wrong with this assumption? The second thing we think is that the more choice people have, the more freedom they have. What does freedom mean if not choice?

[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.

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 ...

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...