Quotes from Barry Schwartz

If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more.

We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation.

As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

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

You buy a pair of shoes that turn out to be uncomfortable. Thaler suggests the expensive they were, the more often you'll try to wear them. Eventually you'll stop wearing them, but you won't get rid of them. And the more you paid for them the longer they will sit in your closet. At some point, after the shoes have been fully depreciated psychologically, you will throw them away.

The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results.

the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.

Over two centuries ago Adam Smith observed that individual freedom of choice ensures the most efficient production and distribution of society's goods. A competitive market, unhindered by the government and filled with entrepreneurs eager to pinpoint consumers' needs and desires, will be exquisitely responsive to them.

Learning to accept "good enough" will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.

KAHNEMAN AND TVERSKY HAVE USED THEIR RESEARCH ON FRAMING and its effects to construct a general explanation of how we go about evaluating options and making decisions. They call it prospect theory.

One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.

Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when they may lack the resources to make them intelligently.

Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: "the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past.

Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations.

Notice that the curve falls steeply at the beginning and then gradually levels off. This reflects what might be called the "decreasing marginal disutility of losses.

the dissatisfaction that comes with social comparison can be fixed by teaching people to care less about status.

no matter how much a person has, it may not be enough.

Students work to get good grades even when they have no interest in their studies.

One could specialize in a certain skill and then trade the products of that skill for other goods.

We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions

The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others.

to be satisfied with our work, we typically need a belief in the purpose of what we do. Amy

choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences, in other words, on their remembered utility.