On The Paradox of Choice -- Related To Happiness

I've become hopelessly addicted to watching TED videos lately. Two of them have been of particular interest:

The Paradox of Choice -http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Why Are We Happy -http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

The first one about the paradox of choice was of particular interest. It pretty much encapsulates a lot of ideas that I've had recently about happiness. This is where my inner "socialist" comes out. How can I explain this?

We all act in our own self interest. Today we don't have to make all of our own food, make our own clothes, build our own houses, etc. We have decided to divide our labor and specialize into different fields of interest. I am a technology consultant. You might be a doctor or a flight attendant or a customer service rep. We each try to do the job to the best of our ability and we benefit from everyone else who specializes and we exchange the money from our jobs for goods and services from others. This is how our economy works.

Although this format may try to maximize efficiency in our economy, does it really make us all happier? I'm convinced that everything we do is to increase our happiness. Every action we take is an attempt to increase our happiness.

In the labor market, we all act in our own self interest. We pick the jobs and/or careers that we think are best and will maximize our earnings and wages relative to our interest in the job. We we specialize into different fields more or less independent of what others think we should do (obviously we would want to pick jobs that have a decent demand for their goods and/or services).

When we're in each of our respective professions, we are generally trying to maximize our earnings. Our companies are doing the same thing. So when we offer products and/or services to our customers, we're trying to get the most money we can get out of them. We are NOT trying to maximize their happiness. Curiously, the more choices we offer them, the more confused they turn out to be.

Example:

You go to the grocery store looking for some salad dressing (as the video stated). You get arrive to the arrive, and OH CRAP, there are a ton of dressings here. Which one should I get? I wonder which ones tastes the best? If I choose this one, will it be good? Will I regret buying this salad dressing if it's not good?

I'm convinced we each ask ourselves variations of the same questions for each purchase we make. There's not just one option. There's tons of options! How to pick?

This is the source of our unhappiness. Not necessarily being unhappy, but just less happy relative to the situation if we didn't have so many options. Excessive options confuse people and lead them to question their decisions. This is not to say that SOME choice is good, but I'm just saying that if we had fewer choices, then we would be MORE happy.

Again, I'm trying to say that since we are all acting in our own self-interest within the professions that we work in, we're trying to maximize our earnings and not thehappiness of customers. This leads to an aggregate decrease in happiness due to all the options people have.

In the video, Barry Schwartz says that is there were more "income redistribution", then we would take some of the excess choices from the rich people and give them to the poor people, who would actually benefit from more choice. I think this idea is problematic, but very interesting. It's problematic in its implementation, because who wants Uncle Sam coming for more of their money? But if Uncle Sam did, maybe they (richer people) would actually be happier...

This ties into the second video question why we are happy. It very nicely reinforces my point that people who have more options question themselves more and have more an internal struggle in their daily lives.

Example from the video. You have a class of photography students who get to choose 2 pictures from their collection of 10 to be blown up and framed. For half of them, you tell them that they should choose one of the two pictures and they will have 3 days to change their mind about the choice. For the other half, they must make one final decision on the picture that they will choose. Who do you think is happier, the people with our without the choice? Turns out the people who are stuck with their initial choice are happier. Whoa. Doesn't work out like you think.

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I hope these videos spark some thoughts in your mind. They sure did for me. I think that if we all step back and accept that people in our industrialized nation are somewhat paralyzed by all the choices that we have and think about all the good we could do by giving those in other countries more choices, we would ALL be better off. It's amazing. Life wants to be simple.