Barry Schwartz Quotes

Ask yourself what is the point of advertising prescription drugs... Clearly they... expect we will... demand that our doctors write the prescriptions.

Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize.

[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.

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

It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead... the doctor tells you "Well we could do A or we could do B. A has these benefits and these risks. B has these benefits and these risks. What do you want to do?" ...We call it patient autonomy... but what it really is, is a shifting of the burden and responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something... to someone who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick, and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions...

[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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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...

We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice... better off seeking what was "good enough" instead of... best... better off if we lowered our expectations... if... decisions were nonreversable... if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

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