Archive for the 'On Books' Category
No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart: The surprising deceptions of individual choice - Tom Slee
While I’d seen the book around in various places, I’d been under the impression that it was an anti-huge corporation book. It turned out to be something far more interesting and deep than simply slamming another big company.
Author Tom Slee shows the reader in progressively complex ways how it is that the commonly-held view of how the marketplace works - that given options of what to buy, people will always choose what they most prefer, and that the most preferred product/company will therefore prosper while the less preferred will fade away - in fact works very differently. From what orange juice you buy to what car you buy, from where you live to what school you want your children to go to, there are many factors which are at play which skew the way reality works from the MarketThink (as Slee calls it) company line. What we choose, in short, is not indicative of what we would most like, but rather what is the best reasonable option given the choices available in view of those other factors. Hence, those who have the power and inclination to affect those other factors have the ability to alter what our choices will be, leaving us with fewer reasonable options to choose among.
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