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In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz lays out an idea that is difficult to understand for most modern Americans.

Quite simply, Schwartz believes there are too many choices in our lives.

In Schwartz's opinion there is an official dogma in all Western industrial societies, which he summarizes like this: “If we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom.”

The reason for this is not in question: freedom is fundamentally good. It’s important to being human, to being happy, to living a fulfilling life.

But what freedom actually means is the ability to make choices. Psychologically, this is important. Since we are free and can make choices, we can rightly steer our ship toward happiness rather than sorrow.

What follows directly from this is another idea—that the best way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. The equation, says Schwartz, goes something like this: “The more choice people have the more freedom they have and the more freedom they have the more welfare they have.”

So Western industrial nations have reacted to this basic formula by elevating choice to a new kind of gospel, now found at every level of our society.

Schwartz points out that his corner supermarket has 285 varieties of cookies and 230 kinds of soup and 175 kinds of salad dressing. He says that in the average big box consumer-electronics store (as opposed to a small box store like Radio Shack), there are enough pieces of electronic gear available to construct 6.5 million different stereo systems.

And, he says, this blizzard of choice extends into far more important decisions than what we’re buying at the store. It’s prevalent in our healthcare decisions and in our relationships; it’s even there in how we talk to one another. Should I walk down the hall and say hi to my friend or send an email or a tweet or an instant message or pick up the phone and call? It’s everywhere these days, and all of it is too much.

Schwartz’s main point is that humans are not psychologically built to deal with so many choices. The goal of all this choice was to bring us more happiness, but dozens of studies have now shown that the exact opposite is happening.

“All this choice produces paralysis rather than liberation,” he says. “With so many options to choose from, people have trouble making any choice at all.”

And even if we overcome paralysis and make a choice, we end up being less satisfied with the result.

Some of this happens because, with so many options to pick from, it’s easy to imagine—say after you get your salad dressing home and taste it—that you could have made a better choice. This imagined alternative is tantalizing enough to induce regret, which subtracts from whatever joy you might have from making even a very good choice. Simply put, the more choices we have the more regret we have as well.

This is further amplified by what John Stuart Mill once called “opportunity cost,” which is the technical term for “the one that got away.”

In every decision, you have to choose A over B or B over A, and afterward—because we try to make intelligent decisions and study our options—you’re going to know what you missed out on.

The problem, as Schwartz also points out, is that “opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get from what we choose even when what we choose is terrific.”

In his research, what he’s found is that psychologically some choice is fantastic, too much choice is disastrous.

The same is true environmentally as well. Not too long ago, I was doing some consulting work for a very green, very ecologically aware company trying to become even greener and even more ecologically aware.

On my first day with this company, they were giving me a tour of their facility and showing me last year’s line of eco-friendly products compared with this year’s line. They were beaming with pride because this year’s line had double the offerings of last year’s—and wasn’t that exciting. Except, as I pointed out, at the core of any decent eco-philosophy is one fundamental fact: less is more.

Look, I’m the same as everybody else: I’m seriously glad that I can now buy an eco-friendly version of every product I use. Hell, even my lawn mower is battery operated, but a few years back, when I went to buy that lawnmower, it was the only version available. These days there are dozens, including Husqvarna’s $4,000 solar-powered automatic robotic lawn mower.

And, as my experience with the cordless electric version proves, whatever the design, these things still break. Or some better version is going to come along. Either way, the stuff turns into landfill in the end.

Similarly, there are now 38 different kinds of eco-friendly toothpaste available at my local health-food store and not one of them comes in biodegradable packaging.

And even if these companies are designing cradle-to-cradle, whatever they build takes energy. It takes space to store and, if refrigeration is involved, it takes energy to store. It takes more trucks to drive it to more retailers. It takes more advertising to spread the word. It takes and it takes and it takes.

A steady-state economy is an idea that entered the world in 1956, courtesy of Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, and became a fixture in the modern lexicon in 1977, courtesy of ecological economist Herman Daly.

It’s nothing more or less than an economy that meets everyone’s need and holds steady. It values sustainability over growth, choosing to balance resource use with resource availability.

It values sustainability over growth for one simple reason: resources are not infinite. And, until they are, anything new that you make is a trade-off and, any time you make that trade-off, one fact is indisputable: the Earth suffers.

So if now we know that psychologically more is not always better, and environmentally we know that less is always more, then why do we keep making all this stuff?

Why have most of the top environmental magazines and websites and whatever become nothing more than a greener version of the Home Shopping Network?

I mean, when Treehugger first began, I found it a great place to get green news. Today, June 26, 2009, their homepage has six items on it. One is something silly about Michael Jackson. Two  offer serious eco-news. Three are advertisements disguised as copy. That’s 50% of the landing page for a site that believes very seriously in its green credentials is selling me shirts, sweets and cosmetics.

Barry Schwartz is right—and I’m not very happy about it.

Additional resources:
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

Updated 12/29/10; originally posted 6/29/09.

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