I agree with Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice TED talk, “everyone needs a fishbowl”. Having a plethora of choice leaves room for indecisiveness, it causes us to put off making decisions out of fear. This leads to procrastination, which he refers to as, “paralysis is the consequence of having too many choices”. He provides multiple premises to support his argument, the one that stuck out to me was, employees choosing a retirement plan. According to Schwartz, studies have shown that many retirees delay picking a plan, causing them to miss out on thousands of dollars that can go towards their retirement. He further explains the impact of too many choices and how it weighs on us psychologically. This video was published in 2007, in comparison to today society, it is ahead of its time.
“You Try To Live on 500K in This Town” by Allen Salkin argues how a salary cap of 500k for bank executives is not sustainable for executives living in New York. The premises supporting this argument is the breakdown of expenses for top bankers. “As hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year”. With emphasis on “setup a life” bankers have a lifestyle and work culture to live up to, the best clothes, cars, homes, and private schools for their kids. The article concludes with “People inherently understand that if they are going to get ahead in whatever corporate culture they are involved in, they need to take on the appurtenances of what defines that culture,”.
2 thoughts on “Precious Carter DB 5”
Hi Precious
You are absolutely right everyone needs a fishbowl, while one may argue that people need multiple options the question remains how much is sufficient, for instance, the example of employees missing out on thousands of dollars because they were indecisive therefore having delayed on choosing a plan became a financial loss for them, which explains that the superabundance of options that were offered to them paralyzed their freedom.
Hi Precious. I like when you said that “having a plethora of choice leaves room for indecisiveness”. When we have to many choices to choose from we find difficulties deciding, sometime we pick the wrong choice. Even though when we have the right choice on our hand we kept thinking about all the others options we let go and this diminish our satisfaction from the choice we made.