The paradox of choice



This is an excellent talk by Barry schwartz. He talks about the opportunity cost of providing choices. He says, for an individual, some choice is better than both no choice and lots of choice. It would be interesting to know whether this extends to the choice available to groups of people also. This could have tremendous consequences of how society is organized. For e.g., this could put an upper limit on the number of parties in a democracy.

Another thing that he talks about is about modern day technology. We all know that it provides us the opportunity to work at any time of the day and from anywhere. So, we have to make a choice every second on whether we want to work or not. Result? Stress. Having failed to work during the weekends many a times, I have felt this stress Sunday evening. I am sure this miserable feeling would not be there is there were no scope of working during weekends :)