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

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

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.