Quotes from Barry Schwartz

we have too many choices, too many decisions, too little time to do what is really important.

AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule.

So by using rules, presumptions, standards, and routines to constrain ourselves and limit the decisions we face, we can make life more manageable, which gives us more time to devote ourselves to other people and to the decisions that we can't or don't want to avoid.

Hirsch calls goods like these positional goods, because how likely anyone is to get them depends upon his position in society.

Once a society's level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence, further increases in national wealth have almost no effect on happiness.

Thus the growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects.   It means that decisions require more effort. It makes mistakes more likely. It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.  

A GENERATION AGO, ALL UTILITIES WERE REGULATED MONOPOLIES. Consumers didn't have to make decisions about who was going to provide telephone or electric service.

Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.

But if money doesn´t do it for people, what does? What seems to be the most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not. Being connected to other seems to be much more important to subjective well-being than being rich.

What seems likely to me is that the causality works both ways: happy people attract other to them, and being with others makes people happy.

The ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation . Simply put, we used get to things and then we start to take them for granted.

So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one's autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.

Hedonistic distress come when experience fails to live up to expectations.

So by forcing us to look around at what others are doing before we make decisions, the world of bountiful options is encouraging a process that will often, if not always, leave us feeling worse about our decisions than we would if we hadn't engaged in the process to begin with. Here is yet another reason why increasing the available options will decrease our satisfaction with what we choose.

In an ideal world, nobody's work would be just about the money. People could pursue excellence in what they do, take pride in achievement, and derive meaning from knowing that their work improved the lives of others.

Everybody makes money for a living, but most of us actually do something that has a point, in addition to just making money. We examine and treat patients, we teach students, we draw up contracts and wills, we write for newspapers, magazines, and web sites, we clean floors, or we serve meals.

Practical wisdom is what's called for in situations that have a moral dimension to them.

How much does it really matter whether your child will soon be enjoying a first year at Harvard or Yale or will instead end up at her third or fourth or fifth choice? Probably much less than you think.

The secret of happiness is low expectations.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl.