It's called "On Our Loss of Wisdom", and it seemed to me to be a David Brooks-style warning against excessive regulation. E.g. "Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisation." and (from the intro) "Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for 'practical wisdom' as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world."
The entrepreneurs, innovators, and socially-responsible capitalists at TED, who pay $6000 each for a seat at the conference, ate this stuff up. The talk wasn't a right-libertarian screed against regulation; Schwartz didn't dismiss rules and incentives outright, and some of the "intro to behavioral economics" anecdotes it provided weren't too awful. But to me, the talk was the same paternalistic technocratic centrism that liberalish foundations like the Gates Foundation peddle, mixed with a worry that elites (in Feb '09, remember) were losing faith in the magic of the marketplace and might turn more to (gasp!) regulation. And in the context of the TED conference, giving this kind of talk has an even less neutral aspect.
-Aaron Stark
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 3:51 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at
cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> this is a great video about why too many choices actually makes our
> lives less free or, at least, why too many choices means we ultimately
> fall back on the more restricting ways of making decisions that we
> were trying to get away from with more choice.
>
> It's by Barry Schwartz who spoke at a Google Tech talk.
He has a book by that title that fleshes this out.
-- Andy