Burden of choice: why more options make us less happy

THE BOOK ENDS with a series of practical suggestions to help us cope with the bewildering array of choices contemporary life offers. Schwartz has clearly put his finger on a national mood, for the book is getting a great deal of coverage in the mass media. But Schwartz doesn't want to leave the problem solely in the hands of individuals. Two days after President Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, Schwartz published an op-ed piece in the New York Times, summarizing his book's message in order to cast doubt on the president's celebration of personal choice as public policy. Drawing attention to proposals for privatizing Social Security accounts for America's workers, health insurance for seniors and school choice for children, Schwartz questioned the wisdom of "throwing an ever-greater menu of" options at the American people."

The psychology of social comparison and regret will affect workers as they decide how to invest their personal share of their Social Security taxes. It is not hard to imagine the privatized misery, the self-blame, of those whose choices turn out to be less than perfect. A lower, more porous social safety net means that some will be objectively better off, some will be objectively worse off, nearly everyone will feel subjectively worse off, and very few will have any reason to feel that their fate is shared. The safest prediction is that the biggest beneficiaries of Social Security privatization will be managers of the conservative mutual funds in which the vast majority of workers will invest in the hope that they will be no worse off than under the old system.

I had a chance to speak with Schwartz about the political and religious implications of his book. Did I have him right? Why hadn't he been more explicit? He suggested that I would find some of the answers to my questions in his 1994 book, The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life (Norton, 1994; reissued '2001 by Xlibris). The earlier book is indeed more explicit. It is a full-scale, frontal attack on the application of market theory to social institutions. It argues that schooling, medicine and even baseball are debased when they are understood in terms of profit-making. It concludes with fighting words: "Economic imperialism must be stopped."

But another thing stood out about The Costs of Living. It was not nearly as widely read as The Paradox of Choice. When I asked him about this, Schwartz acknowledged that this time he had hit a nerve. Less than six months after publication, his newer work is being translated into seven languages. Its author has received countless "heartfelt, thoughtful communications from people identifying their version of the problem." He has been invited to consult with the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Reports, as well as with software designers who suspect that the abundant options they offer may constitute an abdication of their responsibility.