My HeyDay

Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful


Democracy ain't that bad, afterall

An excerpt from Barry Schwartz -the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less":
"[People] had very low expectations. They had no particular expectation when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what this is going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results".
And instead of a pair jeans -his example- think in candidates and political parties in new democracies, and what do we expect from them and what do we get. Maybe is this why so many older generations develop that sort of nostalgia for the years of Franco, the Mexican PRI or the PCUS?

Here his TED Talk about how more choices make us less happy. He couldn't conclude any other way: "the secret to happiness is low expectations".

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4 Responses to “Democracy ain't that bad, afterall”

  1. # Anonymous jordi

    things ain't that simple, dude, i'd say...
    no sé, suscribo todo lo que schwartz dice acerca del consumo (excelente discurso en ted, por cierto), pero aplicarlo a elecciones políticas y la añoranza de los viejos tiempos me parece peligrosillo.
    saludos  

  2. # Blogger Alex Guerrero

    Pero no "aplicarlo", sino tratar de entender por qué alguna gente es nostalgica de una época en la que, 100%, tenían menos opciones y eran claramente peores.

    Pero sí, tómalo con pinzas...  

  3. # Blogger Unknown
  4. # Blogger deraz
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