The Paradox of Choice and many other books
I've been reading lots of books over the last three months—The Corrections; Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; Love, Poverty & War; The Devil in the White City; The Paradox of Choice; Mutants; V for Vendetta (ok, that's a comic book (and I can hear my brother yell "graphic novel")); lots of legal books; etc. The original plan was to write a post about each book, but there were too many times when that felt like doing an eighth-grade book report instead of fun. It would be the height of OCD to force myself to do the book report. I just wanted to note this because I noted someone googling me, and then selecting the "Books" portion, and it makes it seem like I've read two books in four months.
Too, I want to add something to the discussion if I'm going to write about a book. I thought The Paradox of Choice was hooey where it wasn't obvious, but Virginia Postrel already demolished it in Reason, and I don't have too much to add.
Except that the biggest anxiety-provoking choice the modern person faces is the choice of a mate: it's not just the marriage-related choices an already paired-off two need to make, as Schwartz lists on 37-39, but the very "who"ness of the choice, and Schwartz doesn't even discuss this. Forty to fifty years ago, one's choices were limited to people near your age group you already knew; and because people paired up and married quickly and young, there wasn't a lot of time for dilly-dallying before your universe of choices would quickly dissipate.
Today, the Internet creates all sorts of possibilities and choice-complicating options. Even before the Web, I met three women through Usenet and mailing lists, including my first wife. Match.com has virtually no search options, which means you're picking based on someone's face, age, and geography, and little else, but it worked for my friends Dan and Moira. One can seek to narrow the choices: jdate for Jews and Judeophiles, The Right Stuff for a cut at relatively educated people, the thinly populated political match websites. Speed-dating, which crams several dates in in a couple of hours. For those who have no intention of ever dealing with a confirmation hearing, there's Jacqueline Passey's approach. It's not as if any of these methods are confidence-building. Jdate has produced false positives and negatives: all sorts of dismal first dates, while I met someone at a party that I ended up dating for ten months (if mostly non-consecutively over two years) who was also on jdate with a profile I never would've bothered writing to. (Speaking of which: I need to be more glass-half-full, because it's surely good news when the 29-year-old sixth-grade teacher who had contacted me through jdate cancels our Sunday brunch date because she claims she feels she's still dealing with the fallout of the breakup with her unemployed-alcoholic-ex-felon-still-on-probation-ex-boyfriend.)
If Schwartz is to be taken seriously, we should return to the days of arranged marriages, which the vast majority of us would find unpalatable. One quickly sees why Schwartz avoided the question entirely in writing his polemic.
(Compare also this sequence: Lori Gottlieb on satisficing (last paragraph) (1998); Po Bronson on Lori Gottlieb's satisficing (2002); Lori Gottlieb satisfices (2005).)
Too, I want to add something to the discussion if I'm going to write about a book. I thought The Paradox of Choice was hooey where it wasn't obvious, but Virginia Postrel already demolished it in Reason, and I don't have too much to add.
Except that the biggest anxiety-provoking choice the modern person faces is the choice of a mate: it's not just the marriage-related choices an already paired-off two need to make, as Schwartz lists on 37-39, but the very "who"ness of the choice, and Schwartz doesn't even discuss this. Forty to fifty years ago, one's choices were limited to people near your age group you already knew; and because people paired up and married quickly and young, there wasn't a lot of time for dilly-dallying before your universe of choices would quickly dissipate.
Today, the Internet creates all sorts of possibilities and choice-complicating options. Even before the Web, I met three women through Usenet and mailing lists, including my first wife. Match.com has virtually no search options, which means you're picking based on someone's face, age, and geography, and little else, but it worked for my friends Dan and Moira. One can seek to narrow the choices: jdate for Jews and Judeophiles, The Right Stuff for a cut at relatively educated people, the thinly populated political match websites. Speed-dating, which crams several dates in in a couple of hours. For those who have no intention of ever dealing with a confirmation hearing, there's Jacqueline Passey's approach. It's not as if any of these methods are confidence-building. Jdate has produced false positives and negatives: all sorts of dismal first dates, while I met someone at a party that I ended up dating for ten months (if mostly non-consecutively over two years) who was also on jdate with a profile I never would've bothered writing to. (Speaking of which: I need to be more glass-half-full, because it's surely good news when the 29-year-old sixth-grade teacher who had contacted me through jdate cancels our Sunday brunch date because she claims she feels she's still dealing with the fallout of the breakup with her unemployed-alcoholic-ex-felon-still-on-probation-ex-boyfriend.)
If Schwartz is to be taken seriously, we should return to the days of arranged marriages, which the vast majority of us would find unpalatable. One quickly sees why Schwartz avoided the question entirely in writing his polemic.
(Compare also this sequence: Lori Gottlieb on satisficing (last paragraph) (1998); Po Bronson on Lori Gottlieb's satisficing (2002); Lori Gottlieb satisfices (2005).)