In the other domains, world of communications there was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future.
And if some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores, asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is "no."
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It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.
So everywhere we look,
- big things and small things,
- material things
- and lifestyle things.
Life is a matter of choice. All of this choice has two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices.
The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from.
Di bidang lain, dunia komunikasi, ada masanya—ketika saya masih kecil—di mana Anda bisa mendapatkan layanan telepon apa pun yang Anda mau, selama itu berasal dari Ma Bell. Telepon tidak dibeli, melainkan disewa. Salah satu akibatnya, telepon itu tidak pernah rusak. Tapi masa-masa itu sudah berlalu. Sekarang kita memiliki hampir tak terbatas jenis telepon, terutama di dunia ponsel. Inilah ponsel-ponsel masa depan.
Dan jika kebetulan Anda belum melihatnya di toko, yakinlah suatu hari nanti Anda pasti akan menemukannya. Hal ini membuat orang masuk ke toko dan bertanya sebuah pertanyaan. Dan tahukah Anda apa jawaban dari pertanyaan itu sekarang? Jawabannya adalah “tidak.”
Tidak mungkin membeli sebuah ponsel yang tidak memiliki terlalu banyak fitur.
Jadi, ke mana pun kita melihat - hal besar maupun hal kecil, hal-hal materi maupun gaya hidup -
Hidup adalah soal pilihan. Semua pilihan ini memiliki dua dampak negatif bagi manusia. Dampak pertama, secara paradoks, adalah pilihan justru menghasilkan kelumpuhan, bukan kebebasan. Dengan begitu banyak opsi yang tersedia, orang sering kali kesulitan untuk memilih sama sekali. Jadi kelumpuhan adalah akibat dari terlalu banyak pilihan.
Dampak kedua adalah bahkan jika kita berhasil mengatasi kelumpuhan itu dan membuat sebuah pilihan, kita akhirnya merasa kurang puas dengan hasil pilihan tersebut dibandingkan jika kita hanya punya sedikit opsi untuk dipilih.
Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this.
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| Everything was better back when everything was worse |
The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised, because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for -- the secret to happiness is: low expectations.
[You'll do]
I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment -- that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing. Finally, one consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why, who's responsible, it is equally clear that the answer to the question is "you." You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant -- contributorn to this explosion of depression and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault.
So the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you: this is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help.
It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices -- it's not simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse off. If some of what enables people in our societies 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 this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be -- no limits.]
You're supposed to read this cartoon and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? Nothing is possible in this fishbowl." Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world -- that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is, if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and, I suspect, disaster Thank you very much
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