Paradox of Choice

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The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, attribution theory, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, peak-end rule, positional goods, price anchoring, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, search costs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. Praise for The Paradox of Choice “The Paradox of Choice has a simple yet profoundly life-altering message for all Americans. Schwartz’s eleven practical, simple steps to becoming less choosey will change much in your daily life…. Buy This Book Now!” —PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO, author of Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It “In this revolutionary and beautifully reasoned book, Barry Schwartz shows that there is vastly too much choice in the modern world. This promiscuous amount of choice renders the consumer helpless and dissatisfied. The Paradox of Choice is a must read for every thoughtful person.”

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Schwartz offers helpful suggestions of how we can manage our world of overwhelming choices.” —St. Petersburg Times “The Paradox of Choice is genuine and useful. The book is well-reasoned and solidly researched.” —New York Observer “Schwartz has clearly put his finger on a national mood.” —The Christian Century “An insightful study that winningly argues its subtitle.” —Philadelphia Inquirer “Schwartz has plenty of insightful things to say about the perils of everyday life.” —Booklist “The Paradox of Choice is this year’s ‘must read’ book.” —Guardian (London) “With its clever analysis, buttressed by sage New Yorker cartoons, The Paradox of Choice is persuasive.” —BusinessWeek Also by Barry Schwartz The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality, and Modern Life The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life Psychology of Learning and Behavior Behaviorism, Science, and Human Nature Learning and Memory Copyright THE PARADOX OF CHOICE: WHY MORE IS LESS.

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The Paradox of Choice Why More Is Less Barry Schwartz For Ruby and Eliza, with love and hope Contents Prologue. The Paradox of Choice: A Road Map PART I WHEN WE CHOOSE Chapter 1. Let’s Go Shopping Chapter 2. New Choices PART II HOW WE CHOOSE Chapter 3. Deciding and Choosing Chapter 4. When Only the Best Will Do PART III WHY WE SUFFER Chapter 5. Choice and Happiness Chapter 6. Missed Opportunities Chapter 7. “If Only…”: The Problem of Regret Chapter 8. Why Decisions Disappoint: The Problem of Adaptation Chapter 9. Why Everything Suffers from Comparison Chapter 10.

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

In a global village, we can’t help but wonder why we are not as famous as Madonna or as rich as Bill Gates, and how banal or restricted our own life seems by comparison. If you are a maximizer, The Paradox of Choice could be a life-changing book. If you have put yourself into agonies over “if only,” it could make you see that how satisfied you are with life depends not on the actual quality of your experiences, but whether or not you perceive a gap between how things are and how they might be. Schwartz includes a couple of seven-question surveys so you can determine whether you are a maximizer or a satisficer. He admits that he is a satisficer, and it shows in his writing. The Paradox of Choice is clearly not the result of years of toil to get every line and phrase just right so that it would be the “best possible book” about choice and decision making—yet it succeeds because Schwartz has spent decades thinking about these issues and the impact they can have on our happiness.

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Laing The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness (1960) 34 Abraham Maslow The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971) 35 Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974) 36 Anne Moir & David Jessel Brainsex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women (1989) 37 Ivan Pavlov Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex (1927) 38 Fritz Perls Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951) 39 Jean Piaget The Language and Thought of the Child (1923) 40 Steven Pinker The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) 41 V. S. Ramachandran Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (1998) 42 Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (1961) 43 Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1970) 44 Barry Schwartz The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004) 45 Martin Seligman Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment (2002) 46 Gail Sheehy Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976) 47 B. F. Skinner Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) 48 Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (1999) 49 William Styron Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) 50 Robert E.

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While obviously logic and rationality are important, smart people are in touch with all levels of their mind, and trustful of their feelings even when the origins of those feelings seem mysterious. Thinking better, feeling better: Happiness and mental health Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem David D. Burns, Feeling Good Albert Ellis & Robert Harper, A Guide to Rational Living Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness William Styron, Darkness Visible Robert E. Thayer, The Origin of Everyday Moods For many years, psychology was surprisingly little interested in happiness. Martin Seligman has helped to raise the subject to serious study and observation, and his “positive psychology” is revealing through science the sometimes unexpected recipes for mental wellbeing.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

“I often wonder,” he says, “whether matching you up with great people is getting so efficient, and the process so enjoyable, that marriage will [eventually] become obsolete.” What Winchester is expressing is not unique, although it might well be a new phenomenon. In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, the American psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that the overwhelming amount of available choice in everything from shopping to, yes, dating has become for many people a source of anxiety in itself.21 In terms of relationships, this “paradox of choice” is dealt with by subjecting individual lovers to segmentation: an industrial term that denotes how efficiency can be gained by dividing up and isolating the means of production.

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Taibi 22–24 Kardashian, Khloe 68 Kari 99–103, 105 Kasparov, Garry 29 Keillor, Garrison 28 Kelly, John 127–29 Kelly, Kevin 12 Kelvin, Lord 31 Kerckhoff, Alan 77 Kindle 180, 197–98, 203 Kinect 132 Kipman, Alex 132 Kirke, Alexis 190–92, 194, 197 Knack 32–34 Knowledge Acquiring and Response Intelligence 99 Kodak 129, 216 Koppleman, Lee 134 Kranzberg, Melvin 151, 222 lactoferrin 10 Lake Wobegone Strategy 28–29 Lanier, Jaron 90–91, 199, 216, 239 LargeAndLovely 78 Lasswell, Harold 5 Late Age of Print, The (Stiphas) 221 Latour, Bruno 136, 235–36 law and law enforcement 106–33, 137–60 and age and gender 121–23 and Ambient Law 132, 137, 143–44 and automated judges 160 and bail and parole 119–21 and crime hotspots 110–112 and drunk-driving detection 131–33 and legal discovery 125–28 and “PreCrime” 118–19, 123–25 and predicting judicial behavior 155–60 and predictive policing 107–9, 119 and PredPol 113 and “RealCog” 120–21 and relative poverty 117 and rules vs. standards 141–43 and school students 125 Lawrence, Jennifer 169 LegalZoom 130 Leibniz, Gottfried 139–40 Lessig, Lawrence 139 Levitt, Theodore 217 Levy, David 104–5 Levy, Frank 212–13 Levy, Steven 41 Lewis, Sinclair 186–87 Li, Jiwei 35 Life & Times of Michael K (Coetzee) 203 Life on Screen (Turkle) 57 LinkedIn 27 Liquid Love (Bauman) 82 Liu, Benjamin 89 LivesOn 96–97 London Symphony Orchestra 206 Long Tail, The (Anderson) 56, 191n Lorenz, Edward 171 Love in the Time of Algorithms (Slater) 81 love and sex: algorithms and technology for 61–95 passim, 98–105, 239; see also ALikeWise; BeautifulPeople; Bedpost; eHarmony; FindYourFaceMate; FitnessSingles; Kari; LargeAndLovely; love and sex; “Match”; Match.com; OKCupid; SeaCaptainDate; Serendipity; UniformDating; VeggieDate and celebrity marriages, see celebrity marriages, predicting breakup of genetic matching for 77–78 Warren’s researches into 72–74 and wearable tech 94–5 see also divorce; “Match”; PlentyOfFish Love and Sex with Robots (Levy) 104–5 Lovegety 87–88 Lucky You 167–68 Lust in Space 100 McAfee, Andrew 217 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 191 McBride, Joseph 164n MacCormick, John 212, 222 McCue, Colleen 106–7 McLuhan, Marshall 88 Malinowski, Sean 107–14 Manovich, Lev 177–78 Many Worlds 190–92, 194, 197 maps 134–36 Marx, Karl 11, 137n Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 28 Human Dynamics group in 85 Serendipity project of 85–87 “Match” 62–66 tabulated example of 64 see also love and sex Mattersight Corporation 22–24 Mayer, Marissa 228 Meaney, Nick 166–67, 170–72, 176, 205 Measure of Fidget 32 Medavoy, Mike 162 Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Reiser) 142 Meehl, Paul E. 208–9 Meiklejohn, Alexander 231 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 98–99 Michael (Quantified Self devotee) 13 see also Quantified Self movement Microserfs (Coupland) 16 Microsoft 51–52, 132, 192–93, 237 MIDI 199 Mill, John Stuart 118 Ming, Vivienne 25–27, 29–30 Miniscript 22–23 Minority Report 118–20, 123 Mismeasure of Man, The (Gould) 33–34 Mohler, George 111–12 money laundering 19 Morozov, Evgeny 201–2, 226, 243 Moses, Robert 134 movies, see art and entertainment Mozart, Wolfgang 172, 203–4 Mumford, Lewis 5 Murnane, Richard 212–13 musical dice game 204 Myhrvold, Nathan 182 Nara 46–47, 136 NASA 24 NASCAR 37 Nautilus 14 Negobot 240 Net Delusion, The (Morozov) 226 Netflix 52, 127, 176, 188–89, 228, 236 neural networks 166 illustration of 168 neuroscience 159 new algorithmic identity 55, 58 New Division of Labor, The (Levy, Murnane) 212–13 New Statesman 55 New York Times 40–41, 52, 58, 67, 71 Newton, Isaac 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich 70 Nightingale, Florence 118 Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future (MacCormick) 222 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 138, 198 Nudge (Thaler, Sunstein) 137–38 Obama, Barack 189, 225 Odom, Lamar 68 “(Of the) Standard of Taste” (Hume) 199–200 OKCupid 77 On Love (de Botton) 87 On Love (Stendhal) 70 On Man and the Development of his Faculties (Quetelet) 117 online dating, see Internet: dating online shopping, see Internet: shopping via Onomatics 130–31 OptimEyes 20 Orwell 138 panopticon 55 Parada, Sergio 99–100, 102–3 paradox of choice 82–83, 156 Paradox of Choice, The (Winchester) 82–83 Pariser, Eli 47 Parks, Rosa 59 Pascal, Blaise 70 Patterson, James 203 Pentland, Alex 85 personality types 23–25 tabulated 23 Pfizer 58 Pinker, Steven 80–81 Pinkett, Jada 69 Pitt, Brad 69 Plan of Scientific Operations . . .

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Years ago, when Posner was a younger, less experienced judge, he presided over a patent case involving an early application of the kind of targeted recommendation technology Amazon would later carry out using algorithms. In the nascent days of satellite television, American television viewers experienced a seismic leap from having access to around 5 or 6 channels to up to 500. For many people, this was the birth of the so-called paradox of choice. With so many options available, how could they possibly be expected to pick the channel they most wanted to watch? One company came up with an answer. Asking for a single channel in each home, they promised to send questionnaires to everyone who received the channel, asking them to list the type of programs they watched most regularly.

Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

barriers to entry, classic study, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fail fast, Howard Rheingold, late fees, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommendation engine, social bookmarking, social software, social web, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

To fight this deluge of information, we’re turning more and more to trusted sources, whether they be in our own household or in other CHAPTER 1 THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL WEB social circles. Instead of trying to sort, filter, and weed through endless sources of information, we’re focusing our attention on those we already trust, or those we have reason to believe might be trusted. We don’t have much choice. The Paradox of Choice Barry Schwartz notes an interesting side effect of this problem: the Paradox of Choice.5 He has found that when faced with such an overload we not only fail to make the right choice in many situations, but we often actually get paralyzed and make no choice at all! I remember a friend of mine was shopping for a digital camera several years ago, and decided to utilize several online price trackers to help him find the best model at the best price.

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It is said the average person sees anywhere from 500 to 3000 ads each day6 and an average twenty-year-old has watched 30,000 hours of television.7 It’s hard to go anywhere and not see a plethora of advertisements: a few hours casual use of the web and TV per day and you’ll easily see hundreds of advertisements. 5 Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice. Harper Perennial, 2005. 6 There is considerable debate about how many ads people see per day, with the key issue being how many we notice vs. how many come into our peripheral vision. See more: http://answers.google.com/ answers/threadview?id=56750 7 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/index.html 11 12 DESIGNING FOR THE SOCIAL WEB Bias, Bias, and more Bias The problem with advertisements isn’t just that they’re distracting, it’s that they’re also biased: they don’t represent a truthful view of the world.

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See also identity management online invoicing application, 70–71 online motivation research, 95 online participation, motivations for, 97–98 online price trackers, 11 open-source manifesto, 56 Orbitz, 92 ordering, aggregation, 136 ownership, conferring sense of, 97, 119–120 P page views, 174–175 pagerank metric, 175 paid-membership sites, 165, 172 Paradox of Choice, 11 participation motivators, 97–124 allowing for reputation, 109–114 attachment to group, 122–124 INDEX conferring ownership, 119–120 emphasizing person’s uniqueness, 105–107 enabling identity management, 98–105 leveraging reciprocity, 107–109 list of, 97–98 promoting sense of efficacy, 114–115 providing sense of control, 116–118 showing desired behavior, 120–121 Passionate Use state, usage lifecycle, ix, xi, 164 passionate users, 47, 123–124, 144, 162 PatientsLikeMe, 17, 102 PDFs, 149 perfectapology.com, 60, 61 permalinks, 36 permanent URLs, 148 personal computer revolution, 9 personal value, 24 photo sharing site, 16, 25.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do by Richard Robb

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Brexit referendum, capital asset pricing model, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, effective altruism, endowment effect, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, family office, George Akerlof, index fund, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Philippa Foot, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, search costs, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, survivorship bias, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, trolley problem, ultimatum game

This limited view of choice has unfairly loaded it with negative baggage, creating a false impression of paradox and cognitive bias, as the following puzzles demonstrate. Two Puzzles Consider, first, the view that too much choice is unsettling to consumers, as Barry Schwartz argues in The Paradox of Choice. Eating out can be a minefield of choice. A survey of 830 American menus posted online found an average of 114 items offered at each restaurant. Although voluminous menus aren’t new (an 1899 Delmonico’s menu listed thirty-five dishes in the vegetable category alone), it is sometimes criticized as a curse of modern life, a pathology of free markets.11 But if the average consumer dislikes excessive variety, why does it exist?

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While anxiety may accompany choice, consumers evidently want to experience this anxiety and its subsequent release once the choice is made. Are we drawn to movies in which only good fortune befalls the protagonist? Of course not. Enjoying a dramatic plot with a buildup of tension is no more paradoxical than the paradox of choice. The second puzzle is called the “disjunction effect.” It occurs when someone can’t act until he determines his motive, even if all possible motives justify the same action. It is supposed to represent a deviation from rationality. Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir coined “disjunction effect” after conducting the following experiment: undergraduates are told to imagine that they have just taken a grueling qualifying exam.

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On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Translated by Eric F. J. Payne. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974. ———. The World as Will and Idea. 7th ed. Vols. 1–3. Translated by Richard B. Haldane and John Kemp. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909. Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Searle, John. “Philosophy of Society, Lecture 20.” UC Berkeley Philosophy Department, Fall 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yv1pFIxwT4 (accessed February 2, 2019). Seligman, Martin E. P. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Odds are that, like the participants in the research, you picked “choice,” as the first three have negative associations.45 We often believe as consumers that the more choice the better, even if it is more of the same. And this feeling relates not just to the hundreds of thousands of brands we have to choose from every day, but also to which car to drive, television to watch, and phone to call on, and even which bathroom to use. As psychologists such as Barry Schwartz have shown in books such as the The Paradox of Choice, choice confuses us not only about how to satisfy our wants, but about what those wants are. This uncertain disorienting effect is what manufacturers wanted to create. If we don’t feel satisfied, satisfaction may be just one more purchase away. By 2005, according to Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and half days.46 The more our houses and lives bloat with stuff, the heavier and more trapped we feel.

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Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin Books, 2008). Schelling, Thomas C. Choice and Consequence (Harvard University Press, 1984). Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner, 2004). ———. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Basic Books, 1998). Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (HarperPerennial, 2004). Senge, Peter. The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (Doubleday, 2008). Sennett, Richard. The Culture of the New Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2006). Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin, 2008).

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Messina, Chris Metro, Marty Michalos, Alex Mid-Course Correction (Anderson) Millennial generation Miller, Arthur Model T car modularity Moore, Charles Moore, Hugh Moran, James Morrow Communications Moskovitz, Dustin My Sister’s Wardrobe NASA Natural Capitalism (Hawken) Netflix Neuberg, Brad Newmark, Craig Newton, Jim New York Times Nicholson, Dave Nike Nissanoff, Daniel Nocera, Joe Nõlvak, Rainer Novak, Annie Obama, Barack obsolescence Ockenfels, Axel Omidyar, Pierre Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan) one for life online gaming open source collaboration O’Reilly, Tim Ostrom, Elinor Otto, Louis-Guillaume OurGoods OurSwaps ownership: access vs. in Millennial generation reality vs. feeling of sharing vs. Packard, Vance Pagan Island Palfrey, John Pantera, Kestrin Papanek, Victor Paradox of Choice, The (Schwartz) Parkinson, Cyril Northcote participation: mind-set for collaborative in politics Payback (Atwood) Pears, Kate peer provider peer-to-peer exchanges currencies on facilitating of growing norm of hurdles facing middlemen eliminated in return to trust values of see also collaborative consumption; local markets; specific markets peer user Perez, Carlota Picasso, Pablo Piece of the Action, A (Nocera) plastic Pollan, Michael Porritt, Jonathon power of persuasion Prelec, Drazen product lifecycles product service systems (PSS) barriers to benefits of collective wisdom in and non-ownership replicability of success of types of user loyalty in Progress Paradox, The (Easterbrook) Putnam, Robert Qualman, Erik Randolph, Marc Rashid, Karim recession of 2008 reciprocity redistribution markets fairness and idling capacity lower in reuse encouraged by “Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown” (Diderot) Reinhart, James RelayRides renting, rentals see also sharing replication reputation reputation systems reusable goods, value of reuse and recycling benefits of in extended life PSS indirect reciprocity of redistribution markets and trust formed by ReUseIt ride sharing, see car sharing Rifkin, Jeremy Rive, Lyndon Robotics Design Romm, Joe Rooftop Farms Roomorama room rentals Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

How did we get to this tangled place? How do we change the way we work? With great insight and wisdom, Schwartz shows us how to take our first steps toward understanding, and empowering us all to find great work. Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of Why We Work,The Paradox of Choice, and Practical Wisdom. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Parade Magazine, USA TODAY, Advertising Age, Slate, Scientific American, The New Republic, Harvard Business Review, and The Guardian, and he has appeared on dozens of radio shows, including Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, Anderson Cooper 360, and CBS Sunday Morning.

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“Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work.” Journal of Research in Personality, 31 (1997): 21–33.* About the Author Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania. Schwartz has written ten books and more than 100 articles for professional journals. In 2004, Schwartz published The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, which was named one of the top business books of the year by both Business Week and Forbes Magazine, and has been translated into twenty-five languages. Since it's publication, Schwartz has published articles on various aspects of its main thesis in sources as diverse as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Parade Magazine, The Atlantic, USA Today, Advertising Age, Slate, Scientific American, The New Republic, Newsday, AARP Bulletin, Harvard Business Review, and The Guardian.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

R&D Mag. http://www.rdmag.com/Community/Blogs/RDBlog/50-million-compounds-and-counting/. 286 “it literally was one of a kind”: David Nye. (2006) Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 72-73. 286 paralyzing consumers: Barry Schwartz. (2004) The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: Ecco, pp. 9-10. 286 “the less likely they are to make a choice”: Barry Schwartz. (2005, January 5) “Choose and Lose.” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/opinion/05schwartz.html. 287 “even be said to tyrannize”: Barry Schwartz. (2004) The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: Ecco, p. 2. 287 U.S. Patent Office by 2060!: Kevin Kelly. (2009) Calculation extrapolated by the author based on historic U.S.

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And once a vehicle was purchased, the owner could customize it further to the point that it literally was one of a kind.” If the current rates of inventiveness continue, in 2060 there will be 1.1 billion unique songs and 12 billion different kinds of products for sale. A few iconoclasts believe this ultradiversity is toxic to humans. In The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that the 285 varieties of cookies, 175 kinds of salad dressing, and 85 brands of crackers for sale in the typical supermarket today are paralyzing consumers. Shoppers enter the store looking for crackers, see a bewildering wall of cracker choices, become overwhelmed with trying to make an informed decision, and finally walk out not purchasing any crackers at all.

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Deep Progress 74 “more good than evil in the world—but not by much”: Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake. (1996) The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, p. 129. 75 hoping to survive on those crowded shelves: Barry Schwartz. (2004) The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: Ecco, p. 12. 75 at least 30 million of them in use worldwide: GS1 US. (2010, January 7) In discussion with the author’s researcher. Jon Mellor, of GS1 US, explains that 1.2 million company prefixes have been issued worldwide. This is the first string of numbers used in both UPC and EAN bar codes.

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

Think of these fancy options as the Spaghetti Meatball Pizza on the menu at your local chew-and-spew. Sure, it sounds interesting, but you know you're just going to order the same Hawaiian you've ordered for the past 15 years. If that's you, relax — you're normal. There's a scientific term for this behaviour: the paradox of choice. Faced with too many options, the average person will be inclined to choose none. Exhibit A of the paradox of choice? Approximately 90 per cent of the Australian population don't choose where their super money is invested, so they end up in their fund's default option. This is a ‘balanced' fund that balances your money across a mix of assets — generally seven parts shares and three parts cash and fixed interest.

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Dollarmites program domino-ing your debts Donald Bradman Retirement Strategy dumb questions, asking Eichholtz, Piet, on property prices eliminating credit cards emergencies, use of credit cards in emotions, investor behaviour and employment, structure of equities see share investments Eskinazi, Danielle, on buying a home excess payments, selecting Facebook Barefoot Investor page family and friends see also children; partners — buying a house with — happiness and — helping to cope with your death — spending time with family home see houses financial advisors — discussions with — evaluating — locating Financial Counselling Australia financial education programs Financial Information Service Officers Financial Planning Association financial stress — after house purchase — happiness and — levels of finder.com.au ‘Fire Extinguisher’ account — boosting Mojo from — for debts — house deposit paid from — paying off home loan with — payments to — setting up — super contributions from First Home Buyers Grant fixed-rate mortgages Frank from Bendigo (correspondent) freelance work ‘full-service brokers’ funeral, planning for Gittins, Mark and Donna, on building assets ‘Give’ jar goals for employment gold, investing in Golden Ticket to investment government — grants from — pensions policy grandchildren, investing for Grow bucket — pension payments from — setting up growing your wealth Hamilton, Clive, Affluenza Hansen, Barbara, on financial survival happiness — achieving — house location and — income level and — from purchases hard work, joy of Harvard University harvesting wealth Harvey Norman, furniture shopping at health insurance, private HECS-HELP debts Hello Kitty Platinum Plus Visa Credit Card Help Us Grow organisation holding statements home loans see mortgage packages homes see houses Hostplus — ChoicePlus superannuation fund — Indexed Balanced Fund houses — comparing suburbs — downsizing to boost superannuation — prices of — purchasing — refurnishing How Much is Enough HSBC, on poverty in retirement income — doubling — income protection insurance — proportion to live off Index Balanced Fund inflation, rates of ING — Orange Everyday account — Savings Maximisers accounts insurance — financial advice on — income protection insurance — lenders' mortgage insurance — managing — negotiating premiums — offered by credit card companies — private health insurance — repayment for burned house interest rates — compound interest — on credit card debt — maximising investing — on autopilot — borrowing for — for children and grandchildren — in property investment bonds, buying for children iSelect site Jagadish, Chennupati, contributing to Kiva Johnson, Lea, puts children through private school joy of hard work Kardashian, Kim, insurance taken out by Kiva website Law Institute websites Ledger, Matt, on starting over legacy, leaving legal practitioners, advice on house purchases lenders' mortgage insurance listed investment companies, buying shares in Liz (author's wife) — author buys house with — on budgeting — furnishes new house — pays off first flat — shared debit card account longevity, investment and lost superannuation, finding Louis CK, on happiness Mac, April, on Barefoot Date Nights Marks, Lauren, on paying off credit card debts Mates Rates McGuire, Eddie MC Hammer, spending by ME Bank, interest rates Millionaire Next Door, The Mojo bucket — moving into Grow bucket — purpose of — in retirement — setting up ‘Mojo’ account mortgage brokers mortgage packages — costs of — financial advice on — as marketing gimmick — saving money on multimillionaire, living like a myDeductions service MyTax service NAB Bank employment survey National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, on cost of education negative gearing negotiating your debts News Limited cost of living survey Obama, Barack, on clothing decisions OECD retirement study Office for National Statistics (UK) OnePath, on income protection insurance online saver accounts Ouyen, Victoria paradox of choice partners see also ‘Liz’ (author's wife) — financial arrangements between — financial discussion with — helping to prepare for your death part-time work for retirees performance reviews, maximising personal relationships, happiness and pillows, purchase of planting seeds of wealth ‘postcode povvos’ pre-approvals for loans PrivateHealth.gov.au private health insurance product disclosure statements, superannuation funds property, average return on purpose, sense of Rainmaker, on superannuation fees real estate agents realestate.com Relationships Australia rent payments Reserve Bank of Australia retirement, strategy for RP Data online property reports rural house prices Russell, Leanne, ‘Mojo’ account salary sacrifice saving — effect on happiness — for a home deposit — ‘Save’ jar School Banking Program schooling, cost of to parents seeds of wealth, planting Seinfeld, Jerry, on ‘garbage’ self-employment — freelance work — superannuation and self-managed super funds self-storage centres Senate Parliamentary Inquiry into credit cards sense of purpose Serviette Strategy share investments — compared to property — financial advice on — as Golden Ticket — listed investment companies Shiller, Robert, on US property prices Siegel, Jeremy, on gold prices ‘Smile’ account ‘SMSF Lite’ sock purchases ‘Spend’ jar ‘Splurge’ account spouses see family and friends; partners Stanley, Thomas J, The Millionaire Next Door Stapledon, Nigel, on property prices State Trustee, wills drawn up by stocks see share investments ‘stuff’, accumulation of superannuation — financial advice from funds — maximising — need to supplement — ‘SMSF Lite’ — target amount for retirement — tax status of — use of in retirement ‘swinging on the trapeze’ SYN FM radio show taxation — ATO self-reporting system — minimising with superannuation The Millionaire Next Door Tinder approach to finding a financial planner ‘trailing commissions’ trapeze, swinging on Turnour, Ted and Rita, retirement ‘rescued’ by UBank USaver account Uber drivers, retirees as underwear purchases ‘unearned income’ for minors Veda Advantage credit reporting agency Virgin Money waste production wealth — growing — harvesting — planting seeds of — supercharging wills, drawing up work — freelance work — joy of hard work — performance reviews — role of in retirement ‘youth banking package’ Are You Ready to Take the Next Step?

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

For more on Dan Gilbert’s ideas on “synthesizing happiness” watch his TED Talk, “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” http://​www.​ted.​com/​talks/​dan_​gilbert_​asks_why_​are_we_​happy and read Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2006). 4. For more on Barry Schwartz’s ideas on choice and choosing watch his TED Talk, “The Paradox of Choice?,” https://​www.​ted.​com/​talks/​barry_​schwartz_on_​the_paradox_​of_choice?​language=en. Chapter 10 Failure Immunity 1. Angela Duckworth’s studies on grit and self-control are summarized in a great article: Daniel J. Tomasulo, “Grit: What Is It and Do You Have It?,” Psychology Today, January 8, 2014, https://​www.​psychol​ogytoday.​com/​blog/​the-​healing-​crowd/​201401/​grit-​what-is-​it-and-​do-you-​have-it. 2.

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The people who had been told they could swap their prints—even though they had not done so—were less happy with their choices than the people who had chosen the exact same prints but had been told the choice was irreversible. It turns out that reversibility is not conducive to establishing reliable happiness with a decision. Apparently, just the invitation to reconsider and “keep your options open” makes us doubt and devalue our choice. But wait…it gets worse. In his book The Paradox of Choice, the researcher Barry Schwartz informs us that this nasty little feature of how our brains handle decisions goes even further.4 When we make a decision in the face of many options, or just while perceiving that there are lots of other options that we don’t even know about, we are less happy with our choice.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

This rising tide of physical (and nonphysical) consumption also drives a sense of alienation and panic among the Elsewhere class. As there is more and more to consume, a sense of satisfaction is ever more difficult to hold on to for any meaningful length of time—something that the psychologist Barry Schwartz points out in his book The Paradox of Choice.10 Just as we always know someone richer, we know that there is a better car, phone, house, or school just beyond our reach. If not now, then in six months. Since the arms race not only expands upward but laterally like brush fire to infect more and more realms of consumption that we once thought safe from invidious comparisons, we suffer from a sense that our lives are out of control.

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Ronna Larsen, “The Skyrocketing Number of Bank Branches,”e-merging Directions, Colliers Turley Martin Tucker Commerical Real Estate Services, at http://www.ctmt.com/pdfs/emergingDirections/BankBranches Skyrocket.pdf. 9. Juliet Schor, “The Social Death of Things,” working paper, 2007. 10. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). SHOOT THE MOON 1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). 2. For this observation I must credit Natalie Jeremijenko’s research in“Share This Book” (PhD diss., University of Queensland, Aust). 3.

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Damon Centola, Robb Willer, and Michael Macy “The Emperor’s Dilemma: A Computational Model of Self-Enforcing Norms,” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 4 (January 2005): 1009-40. CONCLUSION 1. Elisabeth M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, “The Economics of the Baby Shortage,” Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 2 (1978): 323-48. 2. Barry Schwartz., The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 3. Vinod Baya, “Information-Handling Behavior of Designers During Conceptual Design” (thesis, Stanford University, 1996). 4. Here I must confess to years of screaming at my wife for trying to involve the kids in her work life as well as yelling at her to turn off her cell phone during “family time.”

The Minimalist Home: A Room-By-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life by Joshua Becker

Albert Einstein, car-free, collaborative consumption, do what you love, endowment effect, estate planning, Lao Tzu, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, new economy, Paradox of Choice, side hustle, Steve Jobs

Dress clothes that we might wear if we have the right sort of business meeting. Shoes for more occasions than we’ll ever actually encounter. Men can be clothes hoarders just as much as women. So I have to ask, is all this clothes buying and storing benefiting our lives in any way? In his well-known book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz argued that it is not. He said, “Freedom and autonomy are critical to our well-being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”14 His argument, stated throughout the book and reproduced in studies, is that more choice does not mean better living.

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Additionally, an abundance of choice often results in less satisfaction and sometimes poorer decisions. It would seem from everything we’ve been told that more clothes hanging in our closets would lead to a happier life. But psychologically and scientifically, that is simply not the case. In fact, often, more choice leads to less happiness—the paradox of choice. Not to mention the unending frustration of having to keep up with ever-changing trends. Maybe getting our money makes the leaders of the fashion industry happy. But buying excessive quantities of their products isn’t doing the same for us. Running with the Cool Kids Sometimes the reason we buy more clothes than we need doesn’t have to do with external forces or advertisements.

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Leah Melby Clinton, “This Is What the Average American Woman’s Closet Is Worth,” Glamour, June 25, 2015, www.glamour.com/story/average-worth-of-clothing-owned. 13. Rebecca Adams, “Men Think About Sex Less Than Women Think About Fashion, Survey Says,” Huffington Post, June 8, 2012, www .huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/08/fashion-study-online-2012_n_1580663.html. 14. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, rev. ed. (New York: Ecco Press, 2016), 103. 15. “Surprising Stats,” Simply Orderly, http://simplyorderly.com/surprising-statistics/. 16. Courtney Carver, “Capsule Wardrobe Hacks: 10 Tiny Temporary Tips,” Be More with Less, https://bemorewithless.com/capsule-wardrobe-tips/. 17. 

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Making tough choices about how to spend your time in a busy, busy world is not the only major decision-making quandary that’s endemic to life in the twenty-first century. In our age of endlessly proliferating consumer goods, when entire TV shows are devoted to culling jammed closets, drawers, and garages, deciding what sound system or computer to buy can turn into a major research project. After he wrote The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz got fervent amens from European governments as well as individual readers for insisting that the management of your focus has become one of decision-laden modernity’s major challenges. Many behavioral economists and social psychologists also share his concern about what he calls “the consequences of mis-attention.”

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In one much-cited illustration of the focusing illusion: D. Schkade and D. Kahneman, “Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction.” Psychological Science 9, 1998. p.127. In our age of endlessly proliferating consumer goods: Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice. New York: Harper, 2005. CHAPTER 9: CREATIVITY p.133. William James’s simple experiment on how to improve: William James, The Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI: “Attention.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. p.134. Since the muses of ancient Greece: J. P. Guilford, “The Traits of Creativity,” in H.

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Central Park in choices in Frick Collection in Nietzsche, Friedrich NIMH Nisbett, Richard Nixon, Richard Norman, Don Nureyev, Rudolf nurture brain neuroplasticity and motivation and see also culture obesity epidemic object-orientation Ochs, Elinor Ohio Longitudinal Study old age Omega Institute for Holistic Studies optimism organization orgasm pain chronic panic disorder Paradox of Choice, The (Schwartz) paranoia paraplegics parents: attention drugs and of children with ADHD depressed evening homecoming of productivity and quality and quantity of children’s time with relationships and past Paul, Saint paying attention to someone else to unhappy emotion use of expression W.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

One way to do this is to give yourself or others a multi-step decision with fewer choices at each step, such as asking what type of restaurant to go to (Italian, Mexican, etc.), and then offering another set of choices within the chosen category. In addition to increased decision-making time, there is evidence that a wealth of options can create anxiety in certain contexts. This anxiety is known as the paradox of choice, named after a 2004 book of the same name by American psychologist Barry Schwartz. Schwartz explains that an overabundance of choice, the fear of making a suboptimal decision, and the potential for lingering regret following missed opportunities can leave people unhappy. In the context of seeking romantic relationships, people are often reminded that there are “plenty of fish in the sea.”

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This anxiety also arises with smaller-scale decisions, such as when you have young kids and you find yourself finally with an opportunity to go out for the night: Do you go out with friends or with just your partner? Do you go to a nice restaurant or the movies? If the movies, which one? The more choices, the more chance you have for regret later. While we, the authors, are reasonably happy people, we have experienced the anxiety surrounding the paradox of choice with our own life choices. We were lucky to have sold a startup company at a young age, leaving us with essentially unlimited career options. At the time of the sale, Lauren had just accepted a position at GlaxoSmithKline and was content with continuing down that path. However, over time she wondered whether this was the right path and found herself constantly reading job postings.

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But soon he started asking, What next? Should I start another for-profit company? Should Lauren and I start a nonprofit together? Write a book? The choices were and are endless. Don’t get us wrong—we aren’t complaining. We are just acknowledging that we personally sympathize with this model. Hick’s law and the paradox of choice explain downsides of having many choices. There is also a model that explains the downside of making many decisions in a limited period: decision fatigue. As you make more and more decisions, you get fatigued, leading to a worsening of decision quality. After taking a mental break, you effectively reset and start making higher-quality decisions again.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

We tend to think of “growth” in an abstract way, but what it means in practice is access to an ever-increasing array of goods and services, and ever-greater command for each individual over how they want to lead their life. The “happiness” movement is dismissive of the freedom and scope for self-definition this implies. Do we really need the freedom to choose one more variety of designer jeans, asks Professor Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice.6 He argues that too much choice makes people unhappier. Chairman Mao too was against choice: he thought everyone in China should wear the same style of clothes. Having professors or bureaucrats decide what items we should be able to buy doesn’t seem like a prescription for a happy society. The increase in consumers’ well-being from the availability of new goods and more varieties over the years—from economic growth, in other words—has been enormous.

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This is sometimes linked to the finding from psychological research that people have a “set point” of happiness, at least partly genetically determined, to which they almost always return.29 The Easterlin Paradox, along with the strong policy conclusions some researchers draw from it, has struck a chord. Robert Frank (in Luxury Fever) argued that high taxes should be used to discourage consumer spending, which won’t buy happiness. Barry Schwartz has written about The Paradox of Choice, whereby the great variety of goods and services available to Western consumers only makes us unhappy (despite the fact that consumers do buy a huge variety of products). The Kingdom of Bhutan has become an icon for its policy pursuit of Gross National Happiness, despite the country’s miserably poor human development indicators.

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Cambridge MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Sandel, Michael. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? London: Allen Lane. Sassen, Saskia. 2002. Global Networks, Linked Cities. London: Routledge. Schelling, Thomas. 1978. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: Norton. Schwartz, Barry. 2004. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: HarperCollins. Seabright, Paul. 2010. The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Seligman, Martin. 2002. Authentic Happiness. New York: Free Press. Sen, Amartya. 1990. “More than 100 Million Women Are Missing.”

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Euler, a devout Christian, approached the philosophe, bowed, and said very solemnly, “Sir, (a + bn) / n = x, hence God exists. Reply!” Delighted laughter broke out on all sides as Diderot crumpled before this stunning inference. The next day Diderot asked Catherine for permission to return to France, a request to which the empress graciously consented. Newcomb’s Problem and the Paradox of Choice The philosopher Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was famous as the author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. This closely reasoned defense of the minimal state, published in 1974, resonated with libertarian types everywhere and became something of a bible for many Warsaw bloc dissidents. But Nozick never thought of himself as a political philosopher.

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in Lapham’s Quarterly; “Truth and Reference: A Philosophical Feud” in Lingua Franca; and “The Riemann Zeta Conjecture and the Laughter of the Primes” in Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, edited by Damien Broderick (Atlas, 2008). The shorter essays appeared in Lingua Franca, with the exception of “Newcomb’s Problem and the Paradox of Choice” and “Can’t Anyone Get Heisenberg Right?,” which appeared in Slate; “Death: Bad?,” which appeared in The New York Times Book Review; and “The Mind of a Rock,” which appeared in The New York Times Magazine. I am grateful to the following editors: the late Robert Silvers, at The New York Review of Books; Henry Finder and Leo Carey, at The New Yorker; Mary-Kay Wilmers and Paul Myerscough, at the London Review of Books; Jacob Weisberg, Meghan O’Rourke, and Jack Shafer, at Slate; Sam Tanenhaus and Jenny Schuessler, at The New York Times Book Review; Lewis Lapham and Kelly Burdick, at Lapham’s Quarterly; and Alex Star, at The New York Times Magazine and Lingua Franca.

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Moore, Michael moral philosophy moral sainthood More, Henry Morgenbesser, Sidney Morgenstern, Oskar Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas Moscow State University Moscow University Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus MRI scans Mundurukú Murray, Arnold Musser, George Muybridge, Eadweard My Lai Massacre Mystery of the Aleph, The (Aczel) mysticism Myth of the Given Nagel, Thomas Name Worshippers Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Schwartz) Naming and Necessity (Kripke) Naming Infinity (Graham and Kantor) Nangoro, King Nation, The National Medal of Science National Physical Laboratory (NPL), British natural history Natural Inheritance (Galton) Nature (journal) nature versus nurture Nazis; atomic bomb effort of; eugenics in racial policies of; World War II code system of, see “Enigma code” Neoplatonism Neugebauer, Otto Neuronal Man (Changeux) neuroplasticity neuroscience NeuroSpin laboratory Newcomb’s problem “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” (Nozick) New Left New School Newton, Isaac; gravitation theory of; on instantaneous velocity; time concept of New York, City University of New York Cotton Exchange New Yorker, The New York magazine New York Times; Magazine New York University Nietzsche, Friedrich Nightingale, Florence Nixon, Richard Nobel Prize Noether, Emmy; beautiful theorem of noncontradiction, law of nonlocality Non-standard Analysis (Robinson) nonuniqueness problem Northwestern University Not Even Wrong (Woit) Nozick, Robert Number Race, The (computer game) Number Sense, The (Dehaene) numerical cognition Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles) Omega Point “On Being the Right Size” (Haldane) On Bullshit (Franklin) On the Heavens (Aristotle) “On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundation of Geometry” (Riemann) On Lying (Augustine) On the Mountains of the Caucasus (Ilarion) Oppenheimer, Robert optics Oregon, University of On the Origin of Species (Darwin) Orwell, George Ouspensky, P. D. overconfidence Oxford University Pais, Abraham panpsychism Parade magazine paradoxes; of choice; of infinitesimal; in string theory; Zeno’s Pareto, Vilfredo Parfit, Derek Paris, University of parity, conservation of Parmenides particle physics Pascal, Blaise Paul, Saint peintres cubistes, Les (Apollinaire) Peirce, C. S. Pennsylvania, University of Penny, Laura Penrose, Lionel Penrose, Roger Penrose, Sean Perelman, Grigori Perimeter Institute perspectivism Péter, Rózsa Phaedrus (Socrates) Phantoms in the Brain (Ramachandran and Blakeslee) Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (Soames) Philosophical Explanations (Nozick) “Philosophy of Mathematics” (Putnam) photoelectric effect Physics of Immortality, The (Tipler) Piaget, Jean Pica, Pierre Pinker, Steven Planck, Max Planck length Plant, Sadie Plato Platonism; fourth dimension in; of Frenkel; of Gödel; of Mandelbrot; of Name Worshippers; prime numbers in Playing with Infinity (Péter) “Plea for the Mathematician, A” (Sylvester) Plotinus Podolsky, Boris Poincaré, Henri Polanyi, Michael Popper, Karl Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce) positivism Posner, Michael postmodernism post-structuralism Powers, Thomas pragmatism prime numbers Princeton University; Kripke at; string theory physicists at; Turing at Principia (Newton) Principia Ethica (Moore) Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead) probability Prony, Baron Gaspard Riche de proper names, theory of Protagoras Proust, Marcel pseudoscience psychology, evolutionary Ptolemy Pulitzer Prize pure mathematics Putnam, Hilary Pynchon, Thomas Pythagoras Pythagoreans Quakers quantum physics; Dyson on; Einstein’s misgivings about; entanglement of particles in; founders of (see also Bohr, Niels; Heisenberg, Werner); Frenkel’s interest in; relativity and; space-time in; string theory and Question of Ethical and Religious Meaning, The (Smith) Quetelet, Adolphe Quine, W.

The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams by Tommy Baker

Cal Newport, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs

Indecision costs us more than we can ever imagine. This alarming cost includes time, energy, resources, stress, and the constant wasted bandwidth of overthinking. As we move forward with our dreams, we’re already overwhelmed with logic, reasoning, and trying to figure out “how.” Barry Schwartz, psychologist and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Schwartz 2016), studied the correlation between endless choices and happiness. He concludes that indecision may be making us miserable, saying: “Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.”

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June 2008, Harvard Magazine. https://harvardmagazine.com/2008/06/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination Ryniec, Tracey. “Applying Warren Buffett’s Investing Lessons Today,” Yahoo Finance, October 4, 2017, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/applying-warren-buffett-apos-investing-014001335.html Schwartz, Barry. 2004. The Paradox of Choice. New York: Ecco. State of Obesity, The. “Obesity Rates & Trends Overview,” https://stateofobesity.org/obesity-rates-trends-overview/. Accessed November 24, 2017. Vishwanathan, Sai Preethi, Levi Malott, Sriram Chellappan, and P. Murali Doraiswamy. 2013. “An empirical study on symptoms of heavier Internet usage among young adults.”

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

In 2000, a supermarket experiment found that customers were more likely to buy a new kind of jam when they were offered a choice between six jams than if they were offered twenty-four jams.42 The paper has since been cited thousands of times and used as evidence that many of us are overwhelmed by choice.43 The research also spurred dozens of follow-up experiments on ‘the paradox of choice’. A decade after the initial study appeared, a team of psychologists collated as many of these replication experiments as they could find.44 Among the fifty replication studies, a majority went in the opposite direction from the original jam choice experiment. Averaging all the results, the psychologists concluded that the number of available options had ‘virtually zero’ impact on customer satisfaction or purchases.

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Olds, David 211 ‘once and done’ campaign, and Smile Train aid charity 158 O’Neill, John, and Black Saturday 2009 13–14 O’Neill, Maura 210 Oportunidades Mexico 117 see also President Vincent Fox Oregon research on health insurance 42 parachute study, and randomised evaluation of 12 Pare, Ambroise, and soldiers’ gunpowder burns 22–3 parenting programs 68–9 and Chicago ‘Parent Academy’ 9 and Incredible Years Basic Parenting Programme 69 and randomised evaluations 70 ‘Triple P’ positive parenting program 68–9 ‘partial equilibrium’ effect 191 Peirce, Charles Sanders 49–51 Perry, Rick 150–1 Perry Preschool 66–8, 71, 169, 191–2 see also David Weikart; Evelyn Moore ‘P-hacking’ 195–6 Piaget, Jean 66 Pinker, Stephen 177 placebo effect 10, 29–31, 34, 138, 192 and John Haygarth 23–4 placebo surgery 18–21 see also sham surgery Planet Money 103 policing programs 91–4, 209 ‘broken windows policing’ 209 and ‘hot spots’ policing 93 and ‘problem oriented policing’ 94 and randomised evaluations 94 see also criminal justice experiments; Lawrence Sherman; Patrick Murphy; Rudi Lammers political campaign strategies and Benin political campaign 160 and control groups 148, 155 and ‘deep canvassing’ 163–4 and Harold Gosnell 148–50 and lobbying in US 162 and online campaigning 154–5 and political speeches 160–1 and ‘robocalls’ 152 and Sierra Leone election debates 161 and use of ‘social pressure’ 151–2 see also Get Out the Vote Pope Benedict XVI 119 ‘power of free’ theory 112 pragmatism 50 see also Charles Sanders Pierce ‘problem oriented policing’ 94 Programme for International Student Assessment 73 Progresa Mexico 117–18 see also President Ernesto Zedillo Project Independence 60–1 see also Ben Graber; Judith Gueron; Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) Project STAR experiment 81 Promise Academy 78–9 Prospera Mexico 118 psychology experiments 50–1, 143, 170, 177, 196 see also Charles Sanders Pierce; Joseph Jastrow ‘publication bias’ 199 Pyrotron 14–15 see also Andrew Sullivan Quintanar, Maricela 38–40 Quora 131 RAND Health Insurance Experiment 41, 169 randomised auditing 174–5 randomised trials see also A/B testing and ‘anchoring’ effect 133 and the book of Daniel 22 and Community Led Sanitation 116 and control groups 13, 67–8, 74, 78, 82 and data collection 171–2 and the driving licence experiment 109 and the ‘experimental idea’ 194 fairness of 37, 100, 177, 185 and ‘fixed mindset’ 6 and ‘general equilibrium’ effect 191 and the ‘gold standard’ 194 and ‘growth mindset’ 6 and ‘healthy cohort’ effect 12 and Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) 6 and Kenyan mini-bus driver experiments 115–16 and ‘natural experiments’ 193 and N-of-1 168–9 and the No Child Left Behind Act 210 and ‘the paradox of choice’ 195 and ‘partial equilibrium’ effect 191 and ‘publication bias’ 199 and replication of 90, 124, 195, 197–8 and sex education 119–20 and single-centre trials 197 and ‘virginity pledges’ in the US 46–7 randomistas, Angus Deaton Nobel laureate on 12 Read India 188 see also Rukmini Banerji Reagan, President Ronald 59, 151 Registry for International Development Impact Evaluations 199 replication 90, 195, 197–8 ‘restorative justice conferencing’ 84 restorative justice experiments 85–6, 182 Results for America 211 Rhinehart, Luke, and The Dice Man 180 Roach, William 52 ‘robocalls’ 152 Romney, Mitt 147 Rossi, Peter 190 ‘Rossi’s Law’ 190, 206 Rothamsted Experimental Centre 53 Rudder, Christian 130 see also OkCupid Sachs, Jeffrey 121 Sackett, David 27, 206 Sacred Heart Mission 36 Salk, Jonas 168 Salvation Army’s ‘Red Kettle Christmas drive 157 Sandburg, Sheryl 144 Saut, Fabiola Vasquez 110 see also Acayucan road experiment ‘scaling proven success,’ and ‘Development Innovation Ventures’ 210 Scared Straight 7–8, 94, 98–9, 189 see also Danny Glover; James Finckenauer Schmidt, Eric, and Google 143 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 75, 173 Science 163 ‘Science of Philanthropy Initiative’ 159 scurvy treatment trials 3–5, 16 see also Gilbert Blane; James Cook; James Lind; William Stark Second Chance Act 210 Seeger, Pete, and ‘The Draft Dodger Rag’ 42 Semelweiss, Ignaz 25 Sesame Street 63–5, 83 see also Joan Cooney sex education 119–20 sham surgery trials 19–20, 182 and ‘clinical equipoise’ 21 Sherman, Lawrence 91–4, 101 ‘Shoes for Better Tomorrows’ (TOMS) 113–15 see also Blake Mycoskie; Bruce Wydick Sierra Leone election debates 161 see also Saa Badabla SimCalc, and online learning tools 77 ‘single subject’ trials 168–9 see also N-of-1 Siroker, Dan 148 Sliding Doors 9 Smile Train aid charity, and ‘once and done’ campaign 158 social experiments large-scale 41 social field experiments and control groups 37, 39–41, 139 and credit card upgrades 132–3 and pay rates 136–7 and retail discounts 133 and ‘split cable’ techniques 139–40 and Western Union money transfers 130 social program trials and Kenyan electricity trial 110 and smoking deterrents 47–8 see also Acayucan road experiment; neighbourhood project social service agencies 36, 69 ‘soft targeting’ 36 ‘split cable’ technique 139–40 St.

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Petersburg Times 60 Stark, William 16 Stewart, Matthew, and The Management Myth 138 Stigler, Stephen 50 Street Narcotics Unit experiment 92–3 streptomycin trial 56 see also Austin Bradford Hill Sullivan, Andrew, and Pyrotron 14 Suskind, Dana 70 Syed, Matthew 142 teacher payment trial 111 see also Karthik Muralidharan Telford, Dick 201–2 text messages, and use of 9, 78, 82, 123, 154 textbook trial 123–4 see also Karthik Muralidharan The Battered Women’s Movement 89 the book of Daniel 22 ‘the brevia’ and ‘the scrutiny’ 181 the ‘gold standard’ 194 The Lancet 24, 55, 120 The Matrix 30 ‘the paradox of choice’ 195 the placebo effect see placebo effect ‘the Super Bowl impossibility theorem’ 140 Thirty Million Words initiative 79–80 ‘three strikes’ law’ 99, 101 ‘Triple P’ positive parenting program 68–9 ‘True Love Waits’ program 47 Trump campaign 154 Tseng, Yi-Ping 37 see also ‘Journey to Social Inclusion’ UK Department for International Development 103 unemployment 36, 44–6, 78, 103 see also German government unemployment incentive; job training programs; ‘universal basic income’ ‘universal basic income’ 46 University of Chicago, and ‘Science of Philanthropy Initiative’ 159 University of London 54 University of Queensland, and ‘Triple P’ positive parenting program 68 University of Wollongong 187 US Agency for International Development 103, 210 US Behavioural Insights Team 186 see also Elizabeth Linos US Congressional Budget Office 194 US National Academy panel 100 US Police Foundation 89 ‘verbal bombardment’ and Perry Preschool 67 Vienna General Hospital 24–5 see also Ignaz Semmelweis Vietnam war draft 42–3 Virgin Atlantic Airways 136 ‘virginity pledges’ in the US 46–7 Wagner, Dan 159 Waiting for Superman 79 Washington Post 7 Washington Times 60 Weikart, David 66–7, 71 West Heidelberg centre 71 What Works Clearinghouse 76–7, 208 Western Union 130 Wilson, James 184–5 Wootton, David 26, 203–4 and Bad Medicine 26 World Bank 103, 111 World Health Organization 112–13, 115, 199 World Medical Association 186 Wydick, Bruce 114–15 Yale University, and Innovations for Poverty Action 123 YouWiN!

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Having many choices is generally a good thing, but it’s up to us to exercise restraint. Learn to love constraints Our professional lives have become complicated by more and more choices, features, and options. But we know through experience that no freedom is to be found purely in the maximization of choices. In The Paradox of Choice (Ecco, 2003), author Barry Schwartz makes a similar claim. He says that having an unlimited array of choices and few constraints is not liberating or enabling—it is, instead, a burden and even bondage. Schwartz, speaking from the consumer’s point of view, believes that, in many cases, the abundance of choice does not make us more productive or improve our decisions.

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., 129, 188 Kuler, 86–87, 90 Kwintner, Daniel, 238 L labels, using color as, 78 landscape photos, 119, 120 leading, 39–41 Learning to See Creatively (Peterson), 175 leave behind materials, for distribution following presentations, 58 letter spacing, 39–40 light backgrounds, 82–83 color values (luminance), 68 differences in lightness create shape, 76 lighting, 82, 119 line graphs, 141 line spacing controls, 39–41 Lithoglyph, 90 Loori, John Daido, 5 luminance (value), 68–69, 77 LumiQuest, Soft Screen, 119 M ma (use of space in art), 160 Maeda, John, 21, 135 Mayer, Richard, 192 McKee, Robert, 181 McWade, John, 108–110 Medina, John, 97 Miedinger, Max, 50 Miller, Paul, 148 Mondrianum, from Lithoglyph, 90 monochromatic color combinations, 73, 89 motion, for making a point, 192–194 multimedia, 10, 93, 95 Multimedia Learning (Mayer), 192 N nature, perceiving differences in, 181 negative space. see white space Neumeier, Marty, 10 Newell, Patrick, 222 Nishibori, Kotaro, 24 Norman, Donald, 11 ntan, 64 O “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo”, 183 orange, emotional communication of, 79 P package design, 238–239 The Paradox of Choice (Schwartz), 174 Peters, Tom, 9 Peterson, Bryan, 175 photographs communicative nature of, 108 finding, 111 Kelby’s tips for, 117–120 power of, 98–99 Picture Color menu, 14 picture graphs, 142–143 pie charts, 138 Pink, Daniel, 9 pink, emotional communication of, 79 pixilation, of images, 113–114 placement, of images, 113 planning design, role of sketches in, 12 PNG (Portable Network Graphics), 106 point sizes, for text, 36, 40 pop-up flash, 119 Portable Network Graphics (PNG), 106 portraits, 118–119 Powell, Richard, 131 The Power of Simplicity (Maeda), 135 PowerPoint, 12–14 color wheels in, 67 ineffective documents, 136 Presenter Tools, 58 searching for color themes, 90 static nature of presentations with, 150 video in, 123 Poynor, Rick, 43 Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, 16 presentations design and delivery when stakes are high (Rose), 56–59 designing text for last row, 34 importance of, 5, 7 lighting for, 82 making the text big enough, 35–37 practicing, 15 quality of, 10 slide use in, 109 value of picturing, 108 Presenter’s Dashboard, Keynote, 58 Presenting to Win (Weissman), 56 printed materials, learning from, 240–241 priority, in design dominance and structure used for, 187 guides for directing eyes, 190–191 overview of, 186 preference for human images, 189 salience in, 188 prompts, use in presentations, 58 purple, emotional communication of, 80 purpose and focus contrast elements for, 182–183 depth created by large foreground elements, 183 differences providing context and meaning, 180 dominance and structure used for, 187 establishing strong priority in design, 186 guides for directing eyes, 190–191 human images used for, 189 motion for making a point, 192 overview of, 179 perceiving differences in nature, 181 salience, 188 storytelling and, 180–181 tokonoma (art of focal point), 184–185 transitions for showing change, 193–194 variety and depth in, 182 Q QuickTime, 123 R Rahim, Dr.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

“You engage with someone by finding out how someone else’s words made them feel! That’s ultimately not translatable to an algorithm.” As much as we believe that limitless selection is desirable, we actually crave limits as shoppers. According to scientists such as Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, we are paralyzed and even terrorized by endless options, which is exactly what Amazon gives us. Choosing from every book ever published seems like a dream, until you’re forced to sift through hundreds of thousands of titles on your Kindle, and all the reviews attached to them, hoping to find something good.

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Harvard Business Review, August 21, 2014. “The Rise of the Independent Bookstore.” Huffington Post Books, May 29, 2015. Ruiz, Rebecca. “Catalogs, After Years of Decline, Are Revamped for Changing Times.” New York Times, January 25, 2015. Salmon, Kurt. “The Store Strikes Back.” KurtSalmon.com, March 8, 2013. Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Harper, 2005. Streitfeld, David. “Selling E-Commerce While Avoiding Amazon.” New York Times, June 5, 2015. ———. “To Gain the Upper Hand, Amazon Disrupts Itself.” New York Times, December 1, 2014. Thau, Barbara. “Beware, Retailers: Ignore Millennials at Your Own Risk.” Forbes, October 10, 2014.

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See virtual schools online selection, 130 online selling, 129 online shoppers, 134 Onorati, Christine, 140 Ooey Gooey, 182 Oppenheimer, Todd, 187 Orchard, Rob, 106, 107 Ordanini, Andrea, 39 Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, 184–185 Organized Mind, The (Levitin), 37 Orpilla, Primo, 211, 212, 213, 220 outsourcing, 154, 156, 165, 192 OYE, 16 Pagni, Mark, 52, 56–59, 62, 63–64, 65–66, 69, 73–74 PalmPilot, 31 Panasonic, 54 Pandemic, 85, 91 Pando Daily (website), 112 Pandora, 20 Pane, Jess, 130 Panis, Jacques, 167 paper appeal of, 31, 35, 37–38, 105, 111, 114, 143, 188, 189, 222, 229, 238, 240 digital challenge to, unique, 30, 31 disadvantages of, 143 in education, 181, 188, 189, 192, 197, 198 making games out of, 95, 96 market for, 44–45 See also books; card games; cards/invitations; magazines; newspapers; notebooks/journals; stationery Paper FiftyThree, 47 paperless office, 30–31, 46 Paperless Post, 44–45 Paradox of Choice, The (Schwartz), 130 Park, Rosa, 103–104 Partners & Spade, 138 Patek Philippe, 168 PayPal, 211 Paz and Associates, 127 Pearson, 185, 186 Peebles, Benjamin, 187–188, 203–204 pencils, 44, 138, 208, 212 pens, xiv, xvii, 29, 35, 37, 41, 43, 44, 47, 126, 150–151, 192, 197, 208, 221, 222, 227, 228, 238 Percolate, 219–220 Perrot, Clèment, 70–71 Pescovitz, David, 213–214 Pew Research Center, 142 phones.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

You can reach for tomato juice, confident that you’re getting vitamins and antioxidants and only fifty calories per serving. But don’t look at the “sodium” column—you won’t be able to allow yourself any more salt for the rest of the day without feeling guilty. Psychologist Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, warns that having so many choices increases our anxiety and is likely to leave us less happy. He points out that many of us are regularly troubled by the sense that we may have made the wrong choice, that we could have gotten a better product or a lower price. So many choices. So little time.

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Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American. New York: Basic Books, 1992. ———.The Overspent American. New York: Basic Books, 1998. ———.Born to Buy. New York: Charles Scribner, 2004. Schut, Michael, ed. Simpler Living, Compassionate Life. Denver: Living the Good News, 1999. Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: Ecco Press, 2004. Schwarz, Walter, and Dorothy Schwarz. Living Lightly. Charlbury, UK: Jon Carpenter, 1998. Segal, Jerome. Graceful Simplicity. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Seiter, Ellen. Sold Separately. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1995. Sessions, George, ed.

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See fulfillment media Adbusters, 215–19 children and the, 55–59, 219–20 literacy, 219–20 product placement, 156 television, 29, 150, 154–55, 216–19, 231 See also advertising; marketing; PR Meyer Friedman Institute, 45–46 Miringoff, Marc, 70 Molnar, Alex, 60 Monsanto, 164 Moore, Michael, 207 Moran, Virginia, 211 Morris, William, 140 Mother Jones (magazine), 83 Mother Teresa, 74 Motivation in Advertising (Martineau), 154 N Nader, Ralph, 226, 231 National Consumer Finance Association ad, 149 National Retail Foundation, 13 Natural Capitalism (Hawken), 230 nature abuse of, 90–91 alienation from, 188–91 Bioregion Quiz, 190 ecophobia, 192 living systems, 243–44 participating in, 192–96 as treatment, 6, 193–96, 243–44 See also environmental impact Natural Step movement, 230 Netherlands, 230, 232–33 New York Times, 27 Newton, Issac, 102–3 Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich), 85 No Child Left Behind Act (2002), 61 Norman, Al, 67–68 Norris, Margaret, 86 Northwest Earth Institute, 186, 208 Nussbuam, Karen, 43 O O’Connor, Terrance, 205 Oetjen, Marielle, 19 overwork, 43–45 P Pacific Islanders, 122 paper industry, 91–93 Parade (magazine), 3–4 Paradox of Choice (Schwartz), 42 Parker, Thornton, 22 Pauly, Mike, 49–50 PBS, 219 personal choice Affluenza Self-Diagnosis Test, 174–76 ecological footprint and, 96–97, 241 environmental impact of, 198–202, 204–5 free time and, 39–41, 42–45, 225–27 fulfillment and, 74, 235–37 lifestyle changes, 119, 178–80, 197–202, 204–5 policy and, 199–200, 222 voluntary simplicity, xi, 183–85 workweek reduction, 224–25 See also fulfillment Pew School of Journalism poll, 69–70 Pinkerton, David and Mary, 104 Place for Us (Barber), 207 policy campaign-finance reform, 231 commercialization and, xi, 231 corporations and, 60, 230 deregulation, 81–82 employment, 223–28 extended producer responsibility laws, 202–3, 230 graduated retirement, 227–28 international innovations in, 231–33 key areas of action, 222 mandated product efficiency, 199–200 sustainability and, 232–33, 244–45, 247 taxes, 229–31 political common ground, xvi–xvii, 52–53 “Politics of Well-Being” movement (UK), 231–32 Porter, Lana, 194–95 Portland (OR), 186 “possession overload,” 39 Potomac Mills mall, 14, 17 poverty, 82–83, 84–87 Power of Clan (Wolf), 64 Poyntz, Juliet Stuart, 142 PR (public relations) corporate agendas and, 164–65, 166–67 front groups, 163–64 journalists and, 168–69 pervasiveness of, 161–62 quality of information, 165–66, 170 Proctor & Gamble, 162 products energy-efficient, 197–200 environmental impact of, 202–4, 245, 246 extended producer responsibility laws, 202–3, 230 paper industry, 91–93 planned obsolescence, 148 sustainability and, 245, 246 See also automobiles progress, 16–17, 28, 37, 41–45, 130 PRWatch, 164 Puritans, 133–34 Putnam, Robert, 65–66, 69 Q Quakers, 134 R Rathje, William, 37 Reagan, Ronald, 82, 153–54, 187 Redefining Progress, 7, 239–41, 286 Responsible Wealth, 213 retail chains, 66–68 Rifkin, Jeremy, 3, 139, 162 “Right to Be Lazy” (Lafargue), 140 Robin, Vicki, xi–xiii, 179–81, 235–36 Robinson, John, 44, 47 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 143 Roosevelt, Theodore, 141 Ropke, Wilhelm, 78–79, 151, 159 Roy, Dick, 185–86, 208–9 Roy, Jeanne, 185–86 Royce, Beckett, 17 Ryan, John, 142 Ryan, Richard, 77, 115–16 S Sakaiya, Taichi, 117 Satisfaction Guaranteed (Strasser), 148 Sawe, Caroline, 58, 75 Schenk, David, 41 Schifrin, Daniel, 156 schools, 59–61, 231 Schor, Juliet, 22, 29, 42–43, 44, 55, 62, 82, 224, 232 Schut, Michael, 185 Schwartz, Barry, 42 Seattle (WA), 220, 237–39 Second Vermont Republic, 222 Seeds of Simplicity, 184 self-actualization.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

Another factor is that new technology has done little to relieve an important market constraint—the scarcity of people’s time and energy. No one could possibly examine each of the million-plus offerings in Apple’s app store. And as the Swarth-more psychologist Barry Schwartz argued in his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, most people find it unpleasant to sift through a plethora of options.5 Many people sidestep that problem by focusing on only the most popular entries in each category. But the mere fact that top sellers are becoming even more popular doesn’t mean that the long tail’s promise of a golden age of small-scale creative energy has been empty.

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Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,” American Economic Review 71 (December 1981): 845–58; quote p. 845. 3. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, New York: Hyperion, 2006. 4. Anita Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, New York: Henry Holt, 2013. 5. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. 6. The technological changes described by long-tail proponents enable you to make an informed judgment about the extent of my bias. You can review some of The Nepotist’s music videos here: http://thenepotist.com/videos/. 7. Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, “Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much?”

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

digital nomad, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, iterative process, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Rubik’s Cube

When we’re overloaded with opportunities and options, we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting. So if you have a choice between two places to live and pick one, you’ll likely feel confident and comfortable that you made the right choice. You’ll be satisfied with your decision. But if you have a choice among twenty-eight places to live and pick one, the paradox of choice says that you’ll likely spend years agonizing, doubting, and second-guessing yourself, wondering if you really made the “right” choice, and if you’re truly maximizing your own happiness.

Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, cognitive dissonance, Dean Kamen, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fear of failure, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, publish or perish, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, value engineering, web application

It’s to make life easier for users. It’s critical to pay attention to what they’re thinking and saying about your product and how they’re experiencing it over the long run. Your users are the lifeblood of your software’s success. You reap what you sow. * * * [58] Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Ecco). [59] See Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. [60] In case you’re concerned, the Mac has since been put out of its misery Appendix A. Epilogue We’ve covered an awful lot of topics in this book. After closing the cover it may be hard to figure out which parts to embrace in your daily life.

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Grant (Journal of Applied Psychology 93:1, pp. 108–124) Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews by Norman L. Kerth (Dorset House) The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman (Miramax) Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan (HarperOne) Being Geek (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596155414.do) by Michael Lopp (O’Reilly) The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz (Ecco) Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (North River Press) Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh (Hachette Book Group) Index A note on the digital index A link in an index entry is displayed as the section title in which that entry appears.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

“They’ll come in and choose from a catalog of games and say I want this particular game in this particular denomination with a green background; it won’t be a problem.”75 But what should that catalog look like? Bruce Rowe at Bally was wary of presenting too massive a list of options. “How much choice can we give players, without decision-paralysis setting in?”76 He went on to cite a popular book by the psychologist Barry Schwartz titled The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Al Thomas of WMS made reference to the same book: “It’s an idea called the tyranny of choice—the more choices you give a person, the less likely they are to pick the one that satisfies them, so you have to really help them make those decisions.” The holy grail of consumer choice, he insisted, will not be a jukebox of infinite configuration options.

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“The significance of these choices,” he elaborates, “is compounded by … mechanisms of responsibilization demanding that we … treat our lives as a project over which we should exercise a deliberate and long-term calculative effort.” 11. Rose 1999, 87. See also Giddens 1991, 3; 1994, 76 and Beck 1994, 14, 20, 25. Alberto Melucci (1996, 44) has similarly written that “choosing is the inescapable fate of our time.” 12. Schwartz 2005, 44. Schwartz argues in his best-selling book The Paradox of Choice (cited earlier in this book by representatives of the gambling industry) that despite strong positive cultural associations between choice and freedom among economists, policy makers, social scientists, and citizens, added options do not necessarily enhance societies. Elsewhere, Schwartz notes that upper-and middle-class citizens in America tend to associate choice with freedom, action, and control, while working-class citizens tend to associate choice with fear, doubt, and difficulty (Schwartz, Markus, and Snibbe 2006, 14–15).

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“In Search of the Holy Grail (in Las Vegas): Love and Addiction from Both Sides of the Table.” Keynote speech delivered at the 11th International Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking, Las Vegas. Schüll, Natasha. 2006. “Machines, Medication, Modulation: Circuits of Dependency and Self-Care in Las Vegas. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 30: 1–25. Schwartz, Barry. 2005. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: ECCO. Schwartz, Barry, H. R. Markus, and A. C. Snibbe. 2006. “Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy? That Depends on Your Class Status.” New York Times Magazine, February 26: 14–15. Schwartz, David G. 2003. Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

Our natural drive to say yes to as much as possible, if only for optionality, may help us in the beginning of our careers but hurts us later on. THE ART OF CHOOSING So much of productivity and decision making comes down to how we manage options. One of the world’s greatest experts in decision making is American psychologist Barry Schwartz. In his revered 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Schwartz details how considering more options often makes us less satisfied with the eventual decision we make, not more certain in it. For example, throughout the book he uses the example of shopping for a new pair of jeans. Instead of simply walking into a store and picking up something with a 32-inch waistband, we are now given a multitude of options: dark or light denim, frayed or clean, high waisted or low slung, tight or loose, boot legged or skinny?

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PLANNING AND MAKING DECISIONS MAKE A PLAN BUT DON’T PLAN ON STICKING TO IT. “In preparing for battle”: Tom Kendrick, Identifying and Managing Project Risk: Essential Tools for Failure-Proofing (New York: AMACOM, 2015), 335. SUCCESS FAILS TO SCALE WHEN WE FAIL TO FOCUS. In his revered: Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Ecco, 2004). “Maximizers need to be”: Ibid. “For decades, books”: Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (New York: Viking, 2007), 5. IN ALMOST ALL CASES, BEST TO IGNORE SUNK COSTS. “If I didn’t have this”: Tom Stafford, “Why We Love to Hoard . . . and How You Can Overcome It,” BBC, July 17, 2012, www.bbc.com/future/story/20120717-why-we-love-to-hoard.

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(Hogan-Brun), 107 LinkedIn, 181, 258 listening, 321 lists, 374 living and dying, 26, 368–69, 373–75 Livingston, Jessica, 101–2 local maxima, 242, 243–44, 289 Loewenstein, George, 272 long-term goals, 26–27, 66, 299, 304, 350 Loup Ventures, 35 Louvre Pyramid, 200–202 Lyft, 191 Macdonald, Hugo, 37–38 Macworld, 295 Maeda, John, 107, 186, 308, 354 magic of engagement, 273 Making Ideas Happen (Belsky), 159, 190, 222 Managed by Q, 221 Marcus Aurelius, 39 market-product fit, 256 Marquet, David, 167 Mastercard, 275, 303–4 Match.com, 259 Maupassant, Guy de, 201 maximizers, 229, 284–85 McKenna, Luke, 217 McKinsey & Company, 72 Meerkat, 265 meetings, 44, 78, 176 Meetup, 168, 243–44 Mehta, Monica, 26 merchandising, internal, 158–60 metrics and measures, 28, 29, 297–99 microwave ovens, 325 middle, 1, 3–4, 7–8, 14–15, 20, 40, 209, 211, 375 volatility of, 1, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14–16, 21, 209 milestones, 25, 27, 31, 40 minimum viable product (MVP), 86, 186, 195, 252 Minshew, Kathryn, 72–73 misalignment, 153–55 mistakes, 324–25, 336 Mitterand, François, 201 Mix, 256 Mizrahi, Isaac, 324 mock-ups, 161–63 momentum, 29 money, raising, 30–31, 102 Monocle, 37 Morin, Dave, 273 motivation, 24 multilingualism, 107–9 Murphy, James, 92 Muse, The, 72, 73 Musk, Elon, 168, 273 Muslims, 302–3 Myspace, 89, 187–88, 349 mystery, 271–73 naivety, 308–9 Narayan, Shantanu, 289 narrative and storytelling, 40–42, 75, 87, 271 building, before product, 255–57 culture and, 134–36 National Day of Unplugging, 328 naysayers, 295 negotiation, 286–87 Negroponte, Nicholas, 107 Nest, 63 Netflix, 83–84, 126 networking, 138–39 networks, 258–61, 283, 284, 320–21 Newsweek, 38 New York Times, 63, 122, 275 Next, 141 99U Conference, 9–10, 26, 138, 167, 181, 197, 220, 221, 360 no, saying, 282–84, 285, 319, 371, 372 Noguchi, Isamu, 141 noise and signal, 320–21 Northwestern Mutual, 66 novelty, and utility, 240–41 NPR, 196 “NYC Deli Problem,” 174 Oates, Joyce Carol, 192 OBECALP, 59–61 obsession, 104–5, 229, 313, 326 Oculus, 350 Odeo, 36 office space, 140–41 openness, 308–9, 350 OpenTable, 79 opinions, 64, 305–7, 317 opportunities, 282–85, 319, 324, 325, 371 optimization, 8, 14–15, 16, 93–338 see also product, optimizing; self, optimizing; team, optimizing Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (Sandberg and Grant), 39 options, managing, 284–85 organizational debt, 178–79 outlasting, 90 outsiders, 88, 105 Page, Larry, 60 Pain, 59 Paperless Post, 239 Paradox of Choice, The: Why More Is Less (Schwartz), 284 parallel processing, 33 parenting, 371, 372 Partpic, 120 passion, empathy and humility before, 248–50 path of least resistance, 85 patience, 78, 80–85, 196 cultural systems for, 81–82, 85 personal pursuit of, 84–85 structural systems for, 83–84, 85 “pebbles” and “boulders,” 182, 268 Pei, I.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

Like the study in which people were offered 30 randomly selected chocolates and ended up being less satisfied and more regretful than when they were offered only six randomly selected chocolates.20 Or the discovery that the more retirement mutual funds employers offered to their employees through the investment firm Vanguard, the less and less those employees participated. This has been explained by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, in his 2006 TED talk: Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you’ll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don’t have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer.21 For appliances, is there anything simpler than buttons?

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Deni Kirkova, “Half of Men Can’t Use a Washing Machine Properly and a Quarter Can’t Even Figure Out How to Switch It On,” Daily Mail Online, June 12, 2013. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2340216/Half-men-use-washing-machine-properly-quarter-figure-switch-on.html#ixzz2eyGy9Kr 20 Frederick Muench, PhD, “The Burden of Choice,” Psychology Today, November 1, 2010. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/more-tech-support/201011/the-burden-choice 21 TED, “Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice,” YouTube, January 16, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM#t=552 22 “Adaptive Wash technology automatically senses the size of each load and uses the right amount of water to keep colors vibrant wash after wash.” “Whirlpool Washer,” RCWilley, Last accessed September 2014 http://www.rcwilley.com/Appliances/Laundry/Washers/Top-Load/WTW8500BW/3809722/Whirlpool-Washer-View.jsp 23 “Whirlpool’s Advanced Moisture Sensing System has three built-in sensors to read incoming and outgoing air temperatures while monitoring moisture levels inside the dryer so that the drying cycle ends when everything is perfectly dry.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

Companies want people to make decisions while they are in the store or on the site rather than postponing them, or worse still, choosing to make the decision elsewhere. So what do they do? Provide fewer options The more items, the more likelihood of procrastination. Barry Schwartz suggests in his book The Paradox of Choice that choice paralyzes us and makes us dissatisfied. The more choices we have available for us, the higher our expectations become. The higher our expectations, the more likely we are to be disappointed when the outcome isn’t exactly what we want. In contrast, if the only choice is “take it or leave it,” we’ll be happy that we even had that option.

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“Whitens, Brightens and Confuses.” (wsj.com). February 23, 2011. Retrieved December 2012. Confuse number of options with importance: Aner Sela and Jonah Berger. “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In.”Journal of Consumer Research 39 (August 2012). Fewer options Choice paralyzes us: Barry Schwartz. The Paradox of Choice—Why More Is Less. Harper Perennial, 2004. Choice can be demotivating: Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. “When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000): 995–1006. Present compatible choices: Jonah Berger, Michaela Draganska, and Itamar Simonson.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

There are, though, some well-known pitfalls and illusions here that few us avoid completely. For instance, while it is clearly true that having more money gives us more choices, it is not necessarily true that having more choices will make us happier. On the contrary, as Barry Schwartz persuasively argues in The Paradox of Choice, being confronted by too many options often makes us miserable: the decision-making process becomes more complex and draining; our awareness of what we are forgoing becomes more painful.20 This feeling of being oppressed by an expanded array of options is observable throughout our culture: in the quest by high school seniors for the perfect college; in the bewildering range of alternative settings and gratuitous enhancements with which software designers load up their programs; in the absurd number of hours many of us spend shopping online, comparing hundreds of essentially similar items.

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Martha Nussbaum, “How to Write about Poverty,” Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2012. 19. Paul K. Piff et al., “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 11 (2012): 4086–91. 20. See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 21. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2013). It should be noted that Wilkinson and Pickett’s methodology, evidence, and conclusions have been challenged.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 6. 41. Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2003), cited by Robert J. Samuelson, “The Afflictions of Affluence,” Newsweek, March 22, 2004. Samuelson reports that Americans are consuming more food than ever, but still feeling more alone than before (in 1957, 3 percent of Americans reported feeling alone, while today the number is 14 percent). Meanwhile, 400,000 deaths a year are attributed to obesity. See also Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice. 42.

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See also Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice. 42. Quoted in Eduardo Porter, “Choice Is Good: Yes, No or Maybe?” New York Times, March 27, 2005. 43. Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, p. 224. 44. Porter, “Choice Is Good: Yes, No or Maybe?” 45. Ibid. 46. “Under mandated choice, as much as 75% of the U.S. adult population would become committed potential organ donors” (Aron Spital, “Mandated Choice for Organ Donation: Time to Give It a Try,” Annals of Internal Medicine, vol. 125 [ July 1996], pp. 66–69). “We surveyed members of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) in conjunction with the Foundation for the Advancement of Cardiac Therapies FACT).

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

You can just imagine the mental conversation: “Property tax revenue is falling, but the teachers need a 3 percent cost-of-living raise, and we can’t forget about extracurriculars (cutting the marching band last year was a killer), but we must continue to invest in our new science magnet school—if it doesn’t work, there will be egg on our face—yet it’s ridiculous to consider any of this until we fix our crumbling infrastructure and address our overcrowded classrooms.” For the frazzled school board member, it suddenly looks a lot more attractive to roll over last year’s budget with a 1.5 percent increase on every line item. As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book The Paradox of Choice, as we face more and more options, “we become overloaded. Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.” 2. The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out. You have your routines, your ways of doing things.

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Kamenica, and Itamar Simonson (2006), “Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(2), 673–697. Sheena S. Iyengar’s book How We Choose: The Subtext of Life (New York: Twelve Publishers) is coming out around May 2010, and you should look for it. Barry Schwartz. See Schwartz (2003), The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, New York: Ecco, p. 2. America Latina Logistica (ALL). The case of the Brazilian railroad is described in Donald N. Sull, Andre Delben Silva, and Fernando Martins (January 14, 2004), America Latina Logistica, Harvard Business School Case 9-804-139, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

That brings us up to thirteen choices, and, oh, yeah, there’s an on/off button, fourteen, and you can close the lid, fifteen. A total of fifteen different ways to shut down a laptop that you’re expected to choose from. The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel. See, for example, Barry Schwartz’s book, 100 More from Joel on Software The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Harper Perennial, 2005). Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review: “Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options (‘easy fit’ or ‘relaxed fit’?)

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See communities OOP (object-oriented programming), 57, 181 open source software, adopting features from, 227–230 options, problem of too many, 99–101 Oracle DBMS, 229 Osterman, Larry, 199 outages, 283–288 outsourcing, 80–81, 246 overconfidence, 93 Overjustification Effect, 42 P pair programming, 225 Paradox of Choice, The (book), 100 pay. See salaries, employee PEER 1 (Internet provider), 283–288 Penn State University, 56 Peopleware (book), 21 performance and memory/bandwidth limitations, 172–173 motivation for, 41–45 and systems, 44–45 Petzold, Charles, 196 Photoshop, 65 pointers, 54–57 Polese, Kim, 260 politics, dysfunctional, 28–29 polymorphism, 193 portable programming languages, 173–174 Postel, Jon, 136–137 Powazek, Derek, 17 power management software, 100–101 power wiring in offices, 225 powering off, 100–101 pricing demand curve, 266, 277–280 economic theory, 264–268 focus groups, 278 “get what you pay for” belief, 279–280 large gap in, 276–277 market segmentation, 270–275 net present value (NPV), 275 overview, 263 prioritizing features, 289–296 tasks, 292–293 private offices, 21–23 problems, offering solutions to, 151–154 procrastinating, 292–293 productivity effect of office space on, 21–23, 223 measuring, 213–216 “professional” versions of software, 272 Index 303 programmers, 211–220.

Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, book value, buy and hold, buy low sell high, car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, estate planning, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, index card, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, mortgage tax deduction, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Paul Graham, random walk, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, traveling salesman, Vanguard fund, web application, Zipcar

If you're willing to persevere, you'll have your debt paid off sooner than you think. Tip Conquering debt is like playing baseball: Go out there and do your best every single day. If you make an error, don't give up—make the play next time. If you strike out, shake it off and step up to the plate for your next at-bat. Your Money And Your Life: The Paradox of Choice In The Paradox of Choice (Harper, 2005), Barry Schwartz describes his research on two groups of people that he calls Maximizers and Satisficers: Maximizers only accept the best. Every time they make a purchase (or do anything else), they need to be sure they've made the best possible decision. Satisficers are willing to settle for "good enough."

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

Somini Perlroth, Nicole Sengupta, and Jenna Wortham, “Instagram Founders Were Helped by Bay Area Connections,” New York Times (April 13, 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/technology/instagram-founders-were-helped-by-bay-area-connections.html. 3. “Twitter ‘Tried to Buy Instagram before Facebook.’” Telegraph (April 16, 2012), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9206312/Twitter-tried-to-buy-Instagram-before-Facebook.html. 4. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: Ecco, 2004). 5. Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 2 Notes Essay,” Blake Masters (April 6, 2012), http://blakemasters.com/post/20582845717/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-2-notes-essay. 6. R. Kotikalapudi, S. Chellappan, F. Montgomery, D. Wunsch, and K. Lutzen, “Associating Internet Usage with Depressive Behavior Among College Students,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 31, no. 4 (2012): 73–80, doi:10.1109/MTS.2012.2225462. 7.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest by Ted Seides

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, business cycle, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, diversification, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fake news, family office, fixed income, high net worth, hindsight bias, impact investing, implied volatility, impulse control, index fund, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Lean Startup, loss aversion, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, zero-sum game

” – Scott Malpass “Everybody believes they’re in the above-average managers. It’s like Lake Wobegon children.” – Jon Hirtle “Very few of our best investments have had every single box checked absolutely perfectly. In fact, some of our more mediocre investments had been the things that initially checked every box.” – Adam Blitz “The Paradox of Choice profoundly states that humans are wired to want more choice and more opportunity, but the more choice they get, the more miserable they become.” – Brian Portnoy “Most institutions are prone to overdiversification or its cousin, diworsification.” – Andy Golden “An edge is something that can slip away very quickly

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

As one team of researchers put it, “The cycle [of] . . . thrilling purchase, excitement fade, and subsequent desire for new material possessions . . . lends itself to materialism and decreased well-being.”61 More money also gives us more choices, and research shows that not only can more choices be overwhelming and stressful—“the paradox of choice”—but those who earn more than $100,000 a year spend more of their time engaging in unenjoyable activities (e.g., grocery shopping, commuting) and less time engaging in leisure than those earning less than $20,000 a year.62 More money also tends to make people less egalitarian and less empathetic toward strangers.63 Households that earn more than $100,000 a year donate a smaller percentage of their income to charity than those earning less than $25,000 a year.64 Even participating in an experience that makes you feel that you occupy a higher relative social class makes you less likely to give to charities than if you feel you are from a lower social class.

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See Being-Psychology Osborne, Arthur, 242 Otto, Max, 189–90 overarching purpose/possible self, 155, 159, 161, 162, 162, 163, 163, 164, 170, 172 overcompensation, 6, 57–58 overconfidence, 72, 74 overevaluation, parental, 63, 63n “Over-Soul, The” (Emerson), 189–91, 191n oxytocin, 44 painters and physical illnesses, 106 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 168, 169 “paradoxical self-esteem,” 62 “paradox of choice,” 49 parenting, xix, xxiii, xxxiv, 15, 16, 22–23, 24, 25, 63, 63n, 67–68, 92, 166 Park, Asaka, 50 passion, 117, 139, 141, 142–43, 145, 146–47, 171, 172–73, 175–76, 182 pathways (Hope Scale), 177, 178 Paulhus, Delroy, 122 Pauling, Linus, 115 Paulos, John Allen, 10 peak experiences, xxxiii, 89, 185, 193–216, 219, 221, 223, 225, 228, 228n, 230, 242, 243 “Peak Experiences as Acute Identity Experiences” (Maslow), 205 Pearl Harbor, World War II, 85 Pepper, Gillian, 28, 29 Perel, Esther, 141–42 perfectionism, 19, 55, 58, 69, 72, 75, 222, 240, 252 personality psychology, xx, xxxi, 107 Personal Mastery, 119 personal values research, 33 personology, 219 perspective-taking (quiet ego), 127, 134–35 Phillippe, Frederick, 145 Philosophy of Civilization course, 3 Physical Sensations (Awe Experience Scale), 208 physiological needs, xiv, 11–12, 14, 37, 78, 143n plateau experience (Theory Z), 221, 239–44 “pleasure system,” 43 Poe, Edgar Allan, 111 politics and Theory Z, 231–32 “pooling of needs,” 146 “positive disintegration,” 104 positive emotions, xxv, 93, 101, 146 “positive interpersonal processes,” 42 positive psychology, xx, xxiv, xxv, 103, 133, 151, 200, 238 positive relationships, xxv, 90, 174–75, 176 positivity resonance, 43, 120 Possibilities for Human Nature (Maslow), 251 possibility development, 32 “postambivalence,” 225 posttraumatic growth, 94, 102–6 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 19, 102, 211 poverty, 7, 24, 28, 29, 33 power, xviii, xix, xx, xxxviii, 35, 45–46, 55, 56, 58, 65, 73, 75–76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 115, 122, 127, 143, 156, 160, 169, 179, 221, 231, 232 Practice of Management, The (Drucker), 151 praise, 61, 63, 63n, 72, 165 prayer, 208, 213 predictive-adaptive-response theory (PAR), 25 prefrontal cortex, 25, 27, 28 preoccupied attachment (adult), 17, 18, 18n Price, Richard, 184 pride, xix, 57, 76, 78–80, 79n, 132, 151, 180, 246 primate psychology, 35 principled/virtuous (quality of moral exemplar), 167, 168 problem-focused coping strategy, 101–2 projection, 74–75, 130 proximity-seeking behaviors, 14–15, 15, 16 psilocybin, 202n, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213 psychedelics, 208–16 Psychiatry (scientific journal), 195 psychoanalysis, xxiv, 5–6, 54, 56, 65, 83, 84, 136, 234 psychological defensiveness, 107 psychological entropy, 9–12, 13 psychological flexibility, 105–6, 174 Psychological Review (scientific journal), 195 Psychology and the Human Dilemma (May), 117 “Psychology of Happiness, The” (Maslow), 155–56 Psychology Today, 85, 244 psychopathology, xx, 10, 26, 101, 101n, 102, 122 psychopharmacology, 209 “psychopolitics,” 231 psychosocial development, 226 psychotherapy, xxiv, xxviii, xxxvii, 50, 70, 117, 121, 141, 155, 156, 185, 205, 211, 237 public and historical figures, 88 pure Being.

Soulful Simplicity: How Living With Less Can Lead to So Much More by Courtney Carver

Airbnb, buy and hold, Inbox Zero, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stem cell

It starts first thing in the morning. Should I get up or hit the snooze button? Coffee or shower first? What should I wear? Do those shoes go with these pants? Cereal or eggs for breakfast? Do I even want breakfast? We are fortunate to have the freedom to choose, but according to Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, we aren’t happier because of it. Schwartz says, “When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

For that I would need two things: experts and lots of practice. First things first: experts. There is no shortage of how-to sexual information. From Chigong Penis (competes with the Iron Penis Kung-Fu school, not kidding) to orgasm training on elaborate vibrator-saddle machines like the Sybian, it’s a paradox-of-choice problem. Considering the options, I started to think that I might be reenacting The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. In 1973, Peter traveled with zoologist George Schaller 250 miles into Himalayan no-man’s-land in search of the near-mythical snow leopard. Not to be a spoiler, but he didn’t find the goddamn cat.

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International Medical Travel Journal Medical Tourism Guide (www.imtjonline.com/resources/patient-guide) The IMTJ’s 10-step guide to medical tourism is a useful starting framework for those considering a fun but productive trip abroad. The plethora of options can be daunting, and this checklist will minimize the paradox of choice. Bumrungrad Hospital (www.bumrungrad.com) This world-class hospital in Thailand has been featured in the “Top 10 World’s Medical Travel Destinations” (Newsweek) and is one of the “Top 4 Medical Tourism Pioneers” (Wall Street Journal). The pictures on their website will probably make your own US hospital look like a third-world hovel.

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

classic study, Day of the Dead, experimental subject, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, Kibera, Lao Tzu, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, security theater, selection bias, Steve Jobs, summit fever, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, traveling salesman, World Values Survey

., ‘Zeroing in on the Dark Side of the American Dream’, Psychological Science 14 (2003): 531-6. Nor does better education: See for example Robert Witter et al., ‘Education and Subjective Wellbeing: A Meta-analysis’, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 6 (1984): 165-73. Nor does an increased choice of consumer products: The canonical resource on this is Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: Ecco, 2003). Nor do bigger and fancier homes: Robert H. Frank, ‘How Not To Buy Happiness’, Daedalus 133 (2004): 69-79. research strongly suggests they aren’t usually much help: One example is Gerald Haeffel, ‘When Self-help is No Help: Traditional Cognitive Skills Training Does Not Prevent Depressive Symptoms in People Who Ruminate’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 48 (2010): 152-7.

The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford

anti-pattern, business process, c2.com, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, knowledge worker, Larry Wall, Paradox of Choice, Ruby on Rails, side project, type inference, web application, William of Occam

It is very powerful in unobtrusive ways, supports most of the items on the list above, and plays very nicely with Mac OS X. While it initially failed the cross-platform requirement, it has become so popular on Mac OS X that another company is porting it to Windows (calling it eEditor). The Candidates 179 Choosing the Right Tool for the Job In his book The Paradox of Choice (Harper Perennial), Barry Schwartz cites a study showing that users are paralyzed by too many choices. Rather than being happy that they have lots of choices, too many choices make them uncomfortable. For example, there was a store that sold jam, and to allow customers to sample their wares, they put out a table with three jars of jam.

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

As a generation, we’ve grown up without definitive borders between work and ‘not-work’. Technology allows us constant access to our working lives, which has slowly but surely developed into an anxiety that not working anywhere and everywhere is the equivalent of being in the office and having a nap. We have a sort of paradox of choice – the ability to monetise each and every hobby we might employ, and yet the insistence that if we aren’t earning stripes, we’re cutting corners. In his 2019 article,8 ‘The Toxic Fantasy of the Side Hustle’, Alex Collinson asks when we started saying ‘side-hustle’, rather than just ‘second job’.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Benkler argues that this is a real threat to the children’s freedom: Not knowing that it’s possible to be an astronaut is just as much a prohibition against becoming one as knowing and being barred from doing so. Of course, too many options are just as problematic as too few—you can find yourself overwhelmed by the number of options or paralyzed by the paradox of choice. But the basic point remains: The filter bubble doesn’t just reflect your identity. It also illustrates what choices you have. Students who go to Ivy League colleges see targeted advertisements for jobs that students at state schools are never even aware of. The personal feeds of professional scientists might feature articles about contests that amateurs never become aware of.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Schmalensee, The Catalyst Code, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2007. 9 Even this may change as card companies develop new advertising capabilities allowing card users to be notified of merchant promotions of interest based on their previous purchases, physical location, etc. 10 There is emerging evidence that consumers can indeed be overwhelmed by choice. See B. Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. 11 One side, the seller, knows everything about their products, while the buyer knows little. For the transaction to occur, the platform needs to facilitate this exchange of information by enabling both parties to communicate. Rating and reputation systems such as eBay’s star system have been designed to increase the trust of potential buyers by enhancing the information to the buyer (previous buyer reviews).

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The prospect of the perfect match has become, for this person, the enemy of the good match.23 There is now an extensive literature in behavioral economics about how, under some circumstances, having more choice can make it harder for us to be content with our final selections. Maybe too many of us are always looking elsewhere, always wondering if we really ended up with what is best, and always noticing the other possibilities paraded before us all the time. All that choice can make us unsettled about what we have. There is even a phrase, Barry Schwartz’s “paradox of choice,” coined to cover this phenomenon. Nonetheless, we have to be very careful interpreting these claims. I know plenty of people familiar with these results—that choice can confuse people and lower their well-being—and yet, as far as I can tell, they still all want the extra choice. It’s not like smoking, where you tell people the truth and then many or most of them quit the habit, albeit with struggles.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

But of course the expression “less is more” is in an 1855 poem by Robert Browning. Overconfidence: “I lost money because of my excessive confidence,”fn11 Erasmus inspired by Theognis of Megara (Confident, I lost everything; defiant, I saved everything) and Epicharmus of Kos (Remain sober and remember to watch out). The Paradox of progress, and the paradox of choice: There is a familiar story of a New York banker vacationing in Greece, who, from talking to a fisherman and scrutinizing the fisherman’s business, comes up with a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in New York and come back to vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman, who was already there doing the kind of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

(Original work published 1930.) Ryle, M. and K. Soper (2002) To Relish the Sublime? Culture and Self- Realisation in Postmodern Times, London, New York: Verso. Salecl, R. (2011) The Tyranny of Choice, London: Profile Books. Schor, J. (1998) The Overspent American, New York: Harper Perennial. Schwartz, B. (2004) The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, New York: Harper Collins. Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: Norton. Shipman, T. (2011) ‘State Workers Get Paid 7.5% More Than Private Sector Staff’, Daily Mail Online, 1 December (available at: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2068378/State-workers-paid-7-5-private-sector-staff.html).

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Journalists Is Over’, Pressthink, http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/ pressthink/2005/01/21/berk_essy.html (2005) Rosen, Jeffrey, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 2001) Rushe, Dominic, ‘Fantasy Game Turns Internet into Goldmine’, The Sunday Times, September 2006 Schienstock, Gerd, and Timo Hämäläinen, Transformation of the Finnish Innovation System: A Network Approach (Helsinki: Sitra Reports Series 7, 2001) Schwartz, Barry, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) Sen, Amartya, The Unwanted Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Penguin, 2006) Sennett, Richard, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2006) Shaw, Patricia, Changing Conversations in Organizations (Routledge, 2002) Spufford, Frances, Backroom Boys (Faber & Faber, 2003) Stacey, Ralph D., Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations (Routledge, 2001) Stacey, Ralph D., Douglas Griffin and Patricia Shaw, Complexity and Management (Routledge, 2002) Stebbins, Robert A., Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992) Steil, Ben, David G.

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence by Antonio Cangiano

23andMe, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, bitcoin, bounce rate, cloud computing, content marketing, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, revision control, Ruby on Rails, search engine result page, slashdot, software as a service, web application

Facebook, Twitter, and Google +1 Counters If you read many blogs, you may have seen people showcasing more than a dozen social media icons at the bottom of their posts. Don’t bother doing this. In my experience, these icon buttons are a waste of time, as almost no one actually clicks them. It’s the paradox of choice at work. If you ask me to take one, two, or a maximum of three actions, I may do so. If you offer me fifteen options, I might not know which one to take and I’ll feel less obliged to do anything at all. Social Toolbars in Blogger By default, Blogger already provides you with a social toolbar that includes Facebook, Twitter, and Google +1 among others.

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

Great research and humor Author: Daniel Goleman Title: Focus Why you should read it: Describes the importance and mechanisms of focus Author: Jonathan Haidt Title: The Happiness Hypothesis Why you should read it: Accessible blend of modern and ancient wisdom Author: Edward Hallowell Title: CrazyBusy Why you should read it: Description of busy, likening it to ADHD Author: Tim Harford Title: Adapt Why you should read it: Why we have to fail to succeed—a great read Author: Chip and Dan Heath Title: Decisive Why you should read it: Great book on how we decide Author: Chip and Dan Heath Title: Switch Why you should read it: One of the best on how to make changes Author: Arianna Huffington Title: Thrive Why you should read it: Inspiring read on how to thrive today Author: Maggie Jackson Title: Distracted Why you should read it: This book really influenced my thinking Author: Daniel Kahneman Title: Thinking, Fast and Slow Why you should read it: A brilliant overview of System One and Two thinking Author: Tim Kasser Title: The High Price of Materialism Why you should read it: Explains the research behind Chapter 9 Author: Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey Title: Immunity to Change Why you should read it: A great book: make deep, adaptive change Author: George Leonard Title: Mastery Why you should read it: Describes the joy of practice Author: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz Title: The Power of Full Engagement Why you should read it: Inspiring book on managing your energy Author: Steve Peters Title: The Chimp Paradox Why you should read it: A simple concept that helps manage emotions Author: David Rock Title: Your Brain at Work Why you should read it: Remarkably simple application of neuroscience Author: Brigid Schulte Title: Overwhelmed Why you should read it: Fantastic, and relevant book on the subject of busy Author: Barry Schwartz Title: The Paradox of Choice Why you should read it: The subtitle says it all: “Why more is less” Author: Martin Seligman Title: Flourish Why you should read it: The latest book by the founder of Positive Psychology Author: Sherry Turkle Title: Alone Together Why you should read it: Insightful: our response to technological immersion Author: Timothy D.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

The algorithmic layer on top, which can be manipulated for profit, interferes with the average individual’s ability to do something simple like find a software developer. The same problem arose when I tried to find a handyman to fix something in my house. It reminded me why curation is so useful. In an online world in which everyone is supposed to find their own truth, it can sometimes take forever to do simple things. The paradox of choice can be a burden. Regrettably, I found myself in the same position as the nineteenth-century mathematicians who needed more human computers and couldn’t find them. I wanted to hire an entire team of women and people of color. I worked all my networks; it was far more difficult than I anticipated.

Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life by Gretchen Rubin

A Pattern Language, airport security, Albert Einstein, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Everything should be made as simple as possible, knowledge worker, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, Telecommunications Act of 1996

The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. Translated by Mobi Ho. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Pink, Daniel. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead, 2009. ———. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead, 2005. Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Seligman, Martin. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press, 2002. ———. Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf, 1991. ———. The Optimistic Child: How Learned Optimism Protects Children from Depression.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Jocko responded: “My mantra is a very simple one, and that’s ‘Discipline equals freedom.’” TF: I interpret this to mean, among other things, that you can use positive constraints to increase perceived free will and results. Freeform days might seem idyllic, but they are paralyzing due to continual paradox of choice (e.g., “What should I do now?”) and decision fatigue (e.g., “What should I have for breakfast?”). In contrast, something as simple as pre-scheduled workouts acts as scaffolding around which you can more effectively plan and execute your day. This gives you a greater sense of agency and feeling of freedom.

…

: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Randall Munroe), Ready Player One: A Novel (Ernest Cline), The Gormenghast Novels (Mervyn Peake) Teller, Danielle: Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey), The Hours (Michael Cunningham) Thiel, Peter: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (René Girard) Tsatsouline, Pavel: Psych (Judd Biasiotto), Paradox of Choice (Barry Schwartz) von Ahn, Luis: Zero to One (Peter Thiel), The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) Waitzkin, Josh: On the Road; The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig), Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts), For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea; The Green Hills of Africa (Ernest Hemingway), Ernest Hemingway on Writing (Larry W.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

But many strategies aren’t concrete enough to resolve a well-established psychological bias called decision paralysis. Psychologists have uncovered situations where the mere existence of choice, even choice among several good options, seems to paralyze us in making decisions. (We discuss one example in the “Simple” chapter). In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz discusses many other examples of decision paralysis. Imagine two tables in a grocery store where you can taste different kinds of jam. One table has twenty-four kinds of jam, and the other has six. Both tasting tables were popular with customers. But when the sales of jam were tallied, there was a shock: The table with only six jars generated ten times as many sales as the other table!

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

There were huge differences in the rates of depression across cohorts, suggesting a roughly 10-fold increase in the risk of depression across generations.” See Ed Diener and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5, no. 1 (2004): 16. 30. www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/ (accessed February 28, 2013). 31. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 209. 32. www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/ (accessed February 28, 2013). 33. Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005). Chapter 2. Structure 1. Lau, “What the World Needs Is Financial Stability.” 2.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Sethi, Ramit

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, geopolitical risk, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Paradox of Choice, prediction markets, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, Vanguard fund

We need more information so we can make better decisions! People on TV say this all the time, so it must be true! Huzzah!” Sorry, nope. Look at the actual data and you’ll see that an abundance of information can lead to decision paralysis, a fancy way of saying that with too much information, we do nothing. Barry Schwartz writes about this in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less: . . . As the number of mutual funds in a 401(k) plan offered to employees goes up, the likelihood that they will choose a fund—any fund—goes down. For every 10 funds added to the array of options, the rate of participation drops 2 percent. And for those who do invest, added fund options increase the chances that employees will invest in ultraconservative money-market funds.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

The typical study in the literature has contrasted a small assortment of 4 to 6 items with a large assortment of 20 to 30 items and, like the jam study discussed here, the initial studies found that people were more likely to delay or resist choosing with the larger, 20- to 30-item assortment. The state of the literature as of the early 2000s was summarized by Barry Schwartz, who argued strongly for choice overload in his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins). We wrote about the choice-overload research in our books Switch and Made to Stick, citing research by Eldar Shafir and others who have found evidence of decision paralysis with as few as two options. But the typical study has implicitly assumed that paralysis kicks in somewhere between 6 options and 20.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Business of Fashion, September 3, 2015, http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/mass-customisation-fashion-nike-converse-burberry, accessed November 29, 2015. 60. List of Crest Toothpaste Products, http://crest.com/en-us/products/toothpaste, accessed November 29, 2015. 61. See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000): 995–1006. 5 The “Buy Now” Lie If you’ve read this far, you understand the potential disparity between the legal rights of purchasers of analog and digital goods.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

It could be argued that the social aspects of meal preparation (women usually visit the stores in small groups) are compensation for increasing loneliness or that the hands-on, participatory nature of this type of cooking alleviates some of the problems of increasingly virtual and remote lives. A simple choice Strangely, something else we’ll see in the future is less choice. One problem with abundance is that there’s just too much of it, a point well made by Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice. He argues that having too many options is paralyzing our ability to make quick and meaningful decisions. One solution to this in a supermarket is simply to throw out any product that doesn’t offer a real point of difference or to replace the countless “me-too” brands with private-label alternatives.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

(and Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine), 2003, “Glucocorticoids and Hippocampal Atrophy in Neuropsychiatric Disorders.” Stanford University. Savage, Leonard J., 1972, The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Dover. Schleifer, Andrei, 2000, Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwartz, Barry, 2003, The Paradox Of Choice. New York: Ecco. Schwartz, B., A. Ward, J. Monterosso, S. Lyubomirsky, K. White, and D. R. Lehman, 2002, “Maximizing Versus Satisficing: Happiness Is a Matter of Choice,” J Pers Soc Psychol. Nov., 83 (5):1178–1197. Searle, John, J., 2001, Rationality in Action. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

It was 9:47 P.M. at Barnes and Noble on a recent Saturday night, and I had 13 minutes to find a suitable exchange for The New Yorker Dog Cartoons, $22 of expensive paper. Bestsellers? Staff recommends? New arrivals or classics? I’d already been there 30 minutes. Beginning to feel overwhelmed with a ridiculous errand I’d expected to take five minutes, I stumbled across the psychology section. One tome jumped out at me as all too appropriate—The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen or read Barry Schwartz’s 2004 classic, but it seemed like a good time to revisit the principles, among them, that: The more options you consider, the more buyer’s regret you’ll have. The more options you encounter, the less fulfilling your ultimate outcome will be.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

Payne (1994) ‘How people respond to contingent valuation questions: A verbal protocol analysis of willingness to pay for an environmental good.’ Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 26: 88-109 Schmid, A. (2004) Conflict and Cooperation. Oxford, Blackwell Schwartz, B. (1990) ‘The creation and destruction of value.’ The American Psychologist 45: 7-15 Schwartz, B. (2004) The Paradox of Choice. New York, Harper Collins Schwartz, B., A. Ward, J. Monterosso, S. Lyubomirsky, K. White and D. R. Lehman (2002) ‘Maximising versus satisficing.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83: 1178-1197 Schwarz, N. and F. Strack (1999) ‘Reports of subjective well-being’ in Well-Being: The Foundations ofHedonic Psychology.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

Brain Res Brain Res Rev, 36 (2–3), 150–160. Schreiber, C. A., & Kahneman, D. (2000). Determinants of the remembered utility of aversive sounds. J Exp Psychol Gen, 129 (1), 27–42. Schrödinger, E. (1964). My view of the world (C. Hastings, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York: Ecco. Seabrook, J. (2008, November 10). Suffering souls. New Yorker, 64–73. Searle, J. (1964). How to derive “ought” from “is”. Philosophical Review 73 (1), 43–58. Searle, J. (2001). Free will as a problem in neurobiology. Philosophy, 76, 491–514. Searle, J.

Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, indoor plumbing, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, tech worker, Transnistria, union organizing

What is that in pounds, I wonder, as I get busy with the chocolate spread before me like a banquet. The relationship between choice and happiness is tricky, and nowhere more so than in Switzerland. We think of choice as desirable, something that makes us happy. That is usually true but not always. As Barry Schwartz has shown convincingly in his book The Paradox of Choice, there is such a thing as too much choice. Faced with a surplus of options (especially meaningless ones), we get confused, overwhelmed, less happy. On the one hand, the Swiss have more choices than any other people on the planet, and not just when it comes to chocolate. Their system of direct democracy means that the Swiss are constantly voting on issues large and small: whether to join the United Nations, whether to ban absinthe.

Lonely Planet Kauai by Lonely Planet, Adam Karlin, Greg Benchwick

call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Easter island, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Paradox of Choice, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, union organizing

Hiking on the North Shore | Prisma By Dukas Presseagentur Gmbh/Alamy Stock Photo © Beaches When it comes to finding that ideal stretch of sand, Kauaʻi presents an embarrassment of riches. Whether you crave the all-natural and pristine or something more family friendly, if you need waves or value placid, sheltered coves, this island is a living example of the paradox of choice. Thankfully, with time, you can explore them all. Lumahaʻi Beach If you fancy a romantic stroll, or ideal beach-run terrain, this blonde beauty delivers. Haʻena Beach Park Reefs alive and teeming, ample sand space, on-duty lifeguards and bathrooms, too. Keʻe Beach The beach at the end of the road delivers the very best North Shore sunsets.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

Abraham Maslow, classic study, coherent worldview, crack epidemic, delayed gratification, do well by doing good, feminist movement, hedonic treadmill, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, Peter Singer: altruism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, stem cell, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the scientific method, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Yet, when people are actually given a larger array of c h o i c e s — f o r example, an assortment of thirty (rather than six) gourmet chocolates from which to choose—they are less likely to m a k e a choice; and if they do, they are less satisfied with it.60 T h e more choices there are, the m o r e you expect to find a perfect fit; yet, at the same time, the larger the array, the less likely it becomes that you picked the best item. You leave the store less confident in your choice, more likely to feel regret, and more likely to think about the options you didn't choose. If you can avoid making a choice, you are more likely to do so. T h e psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the "paradox of choice":61 We value choice and put ourselves in situations of choice, even though choice often undercuts our happiness. But Schwartz and his colleagues62 find that the paradox mostly applies to people they call "maximizers"—those who habitually try to evaluate all the options, seek out more information, and make the best choice (or "maximize their utility," as economists would say).

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Rothschild, K. (1971) ‘Introduction’, in 286 — (1998) The Overspent American: Upscaling, downshifting, and the new consumer, New York: Harper Perennial. — (2004) Born to Buy, New York: Scribner. Schumpeter, J. (1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper and Row. — (1954) History of Economic Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press. Schwartz, B. (2004) The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less, New York: HarperCollins. Sen, A. K. (1999) Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf. Sharpe, A. (2003) ‘Linkages between economic growth and inequality: introduction and overview’, Canadian Public Policy, 29, Supplement, pp. S1–S14. Shawn, W. (1991) The Fever, New York: Grove Press.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Instead of picking a DVD to watch from a couple thousand at Blockbuster, you have tens of thousands of movies on demand through Netflix, and hundreds of thousands more through Apple and Amazon. Without a new interaction metaphor that can organize all those options with a new mental model, we’re left in a world defined by what the psychologist Barry Schwartz called the “paradox of choice.” Presented with too many options, it’s easy to choose nothing, or to be disappointed with what you choose. That’s the promise of personalization: to give us exactly what we want most while we spend as little energy as possible on making a decision. The stress of overwhelming choice is one that companies such as Amazon and Netflix are attempting to solve with algorithms, but it typically can’t be addressed in the physical world.

Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food: A Grocer's Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food by Sam Mogannam, Dabney Gough

carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, food miles, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, iterative process, Mason jar, Paradox of Choice

It’s often necessary to turn elsewhere for cooking oil, pasta, canned tuna, and other staples, and for most of us, that means going to the grocery store. It can be a daunting task. The average grocery store now boasts more than forty-five thousand SKUs (individual products), making it easy to fall victim to the paradox of choice. It’s hard to keep track of what’s out there, let alone home in on what’s good, especially with all the advertisements and promotions that savvy food marketers inundate us with. These distractions have conditioned us to prioritize price and brand over quality and good health. The proliferation of choices isn’t just junk food, either.

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

Whether it is through renewed economic or artistic expression, swirling microtrends in those countries have a profound impact on everyone in those societies, as more and more people seek greater expression either in those forms or in other innovative ways. Some have argued that the explosion of choice in both products and identities is confusing, paralyzing—even depressing. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blink and Barry Schwartz described in The Paradox of Choice, having twenty-four options of jam will draw shoppers in, but having six options of jam will actually trigger more sales. Having too many choices gives rise to feelings of pressure, overload, and regret. We’d rather not have any jam than look back and fear that we chose the wrong one. We’d rather not build ourselves into independent beings than experience the disappointment of being (inevitably) imperfect.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Lepper, “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (December 2000): 995–1006, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995. 13.Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 39–49; Peters et al., “More Is Not Always Better,” 117–18. 14.Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Ecco, 2004), 128. 15.Roets et al., “The Tyranny of Choice,” 689; Iyengar and Lepper, “When Choice Is Demotivating”; Peters et al., “More Is Not Always Better”; Gerri Spassova and Alice M. Isen, “Positive Affect Moderates the Impact of Assortment Size on Choice Satisfaction,” Journal of Retailing 89, no. 4 (2013): 398, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2013.05.003; Marianne Bertrand et al., “What’s Advertising Content Worth?

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Here’s why: when banks choose their own regulators—and gravitate toward those that promise the least oversight—more rigorous regulatory agencies may see their domain erode. And a regulator with no one to regulate has no reason to exist. So regulators have every incentive to be lenient in order to attract more financial institutions into their regulatory nets. Here too we have a race to the bottom. Such is the paradox of choice or “regulatory shopping.” In 2009 the Obama administration proposed a serious overhaul of financial regulation. It included creating three new federal regulatory agencies: the Financial Services Oversight Council, which would serve as a kind of über-regulator, coordinating regulation across agencies, eliminating gaps, and working to identify institutions that might pose a systemic risk to the financial system; a National Bank Supervisor, which would oversee all banks with a federal charter; and an Office of National Insurance, which would take on responsibility for regulating insurers.

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

23andMe, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, Black Swan, business intelligence, card file, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, data science, database schema, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Firefox, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, information retrieval, lake wobegon effect, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, natural language processing, openstreetmap, Paradox of Choice, power law, prediction markets, profit motive, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Simon Singh, social bookmarking, social graph, SPARQL, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, supply-chain management, systematic bias, TED Talk, text mining, the long tail, Vernor Vinge, web application

Data Isn’t Free from the Eye of the Beholder Finally, even in realms where solid causal explanation is possible, when data is collected honestly and modeled carefully by a judicious student of Fisher and (if our pupil is so inclined) Bayes, who accounts for variation and validates his model (and still remains skeptical of its results), a couple of cognitive biases cloud our thinking. In the real world, we operate pseudoprobabilistically at best. Just as the statisticians tend to their tsk-tsk blogs, the behavioral economists have made a field from their own chronicles of infamy. The narrative fallacy, confirmation bias, paradox of choice, asymmetry of risk-taking, base rate fallacy, and hyperbolic discounting were mentioned earlier. Psychologists have indexed many others, ranging from anchoring (overreliance on a single recent data point in making a decision) to the Lake Wobegon effect (the phenomenon of more than half of individuals in a population believing they are above average).

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

See also: Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York, 1999); Oliver James, Affluenza (London, 2007); and Neal Lawson, All Consuming: How Shopping Got Us into This Mess and How We Can Find Our Way Out (London, 2009). In a more academic vein, see esp. Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York, 1999); Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (New York, 2005); Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford, 2006); and Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, 2007). 7. Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York, 1979), 3. See also the US Center for Consumer Freedom, https://www.consumerfreedom.com. 8.

…

Kohli, ‘Private and Public Transfers between Generations: Linking the Family and the State’, in: European Societies 1, no. 1, 1999: 81–104. This paragraph further draws on Martin Kohli, ‘Ageing and Justice’, in: Binstock & George, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, 456–78; and Attias-Donfut, ed., Solidarités. CHAPTER 12 1. Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. 2. UK Audit Commission, ‘Acute Hospital Portfolio: Review of National Findings’ (2001): 220 million meals. McDonald’s sold around 700 million meals at the time in the whole of the United Kingdom. 3. Eugene C. McCreary, ‘Social Welfare and Business: The Krupp Welfare Program, 1860–1914’, in: Business History Review 42, no. 1, 1968: 24–49. 4.

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

Wired, May 1995, www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/turing_pr.html (accessed May 31, 2010). 9 Mihaly Csíkszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000 [1st ed. 1975]), and Natasha Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). 10 Mihaly Csíkszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & and Row, 1990). 11 With too much volume, of course, e-mail becomes too stressful to be relaxing. But “doing e-mail,” no matter how onerous, can put one in the zone. 12 Natasha Schüll, Addiction by Design. On the issue of unreal choices, Schüll refers to the work of psychologist Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Harper Collins, 2003). 13 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), see, especially, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” 65-90. 14 Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes a compelled behavior he calls the “seeking drive.”

API Design Patterns by Jj Geewax

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, cognitive load, continuous integration, COVID-19, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, imposter syndrome, Internet of things, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, loose coupling, machine readable, microservices, natural language processing, Paradox of Choice, ride hailing / ride sharing, social graph, sorting algorithm

While there is typically never a perfect choice on these topics, the least we can do is understand the trade-offs we’re making and ensure that these choices are made consciously and intentionally. Let’s take a moment to understand the various spectrums we should consider when deciding on the compatibility policy for each unique situation. 24.4.1 Granularity vs. simplicity The first, very broad, spectrum that many of our choices will lie on is one of choice. In the book The Paradox of Choice (Harper Perennial, 2004), Barry Schwartz discusses how more choice for consumer products doesn’t always lead to happier buyers. Instead, the overwhelming number of choices can actually cause increased levels of anxiety. When designing an API, we’re not really buying a product at a shopping mall; however, the argument may still carry some weight and is worth looking at.

Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

[122] “Subpoenas and Search Warrants as Security Threats”, Ed Felten, 25 August 2009, http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/subpoenas-andsearch-warrants-security-threats. [123] “When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol.79, No.6 (December 2000), p.995. [124] “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less”, Barry Schwartz, Harper Collins, 2004. [125] “On the Rate of Gain of Information”, William Hick, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol.4, No.1 (1952), p.11. [126] “Stimulus information as a determinant of reaction time”, Ray Hyman, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol.45, No.3 (March 1953), p.188. [127] “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making”, William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Vol.1, No.1 (March 1988), p.7. [128] “Do Defaults Save Lives?”