peteg's blog - noise - books - 2007 02 01 ParadoxOfChoice

Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice.

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Finally got around to reading Barry Schwartz's book that fleshes out his excellent talk at Google. It's a well assembled melange of ideas organised around the gap between what economics promises to optimise (property, wealth, choice, income levels, education, ...) and peoples' wellbeing. Yes, you'd be right to call it a self-help book, albeit one with a lot of academic citations.

I hope to go through this book again in the near future and tease out some of the arguments over on the wiki.

On a related note, an article by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, Why Hawks Win.