At 09:38 AM 9/19/2009, mart wrote:
>i wasn't talking about swarthmore students----rather barry schwartz and
>his analyses in his book (which i read probably 5 years ago (in my
>pu-bleak library-----its 50% a homeless shelter, though they now have a
>rule of 'no sleeping, no sex in the bathrooms or between the bookshelves';
>kinduh nice that law and order of advanced civilization).
>
>i just felt he was a bit in the ivory tower when discussing how people
>often make bad choices. and i think he neglected the incentive to make
>me people make bad choices----for some people to maske good choices (eg
>eat at whole foods) they have to get other people make bad choices (sell
>them something that may be addictive, unnecesary, etc.)
>
> it reminds me of some socialist type academics who write something nice,
> about cooperative economics, so you visit them, and they suggest 'how
> about you get a job at walmart, and then organize the people into one big
> union, and then we'll have a nonviolent socialist
> revolution, redistribute wealth and political power and perks and share
> good jobs. drop me a card when you succeed, and keep an eye out for my
> next book on how we'll organize society when you've have finished
> stocking the shelves.'
>
ha. that's hilarious. i know a couple dozen socialist type academics from both public and private universities, none of them would suggest any such thing. instead they are typically involved in union organizing, anti-war work, feminist activism, etc.
from the video, i got the sense that he would tell us that whole foods is not a good choice; rather, it is just another venue where there is so much choice you end up falling back on traditional ways of making a decision. which would explain the success of whole foods' genre of supermarket pastoral -- a sentimentalized romanticism that induces people to buy crap based on images of cows grazing in pastures when,in fact, such cows are not freely roaming the pastures at all.
shag