Economists often claim that, from a welfare
perspective, more choice can never make one worse off. The argument is that if
I’m given more options to choose from, I can’t possibly do worse because I
still have all the options that were available to me in a smaller choice set.
It’s a compelling argument. But what if the choice set is too large? Being lazy
sounds pretty rational to me.
My inspiration for this argument, of course, is
my job hunt. I started by staring blankly at the Google homepage wondering what
I should type. I don’t even know which industry I want to work in so there
really is no logical starting point to browse through all the choices unless I
choose something entirely arbitrary. I like to think of myself as a new breed
of ‘reasonably rational people’ or ‘neo-rational’. And I was somewhat relieved
when I found that there are only about 5 firms that might bother to look at my
CV. To think of all the time I would’ve spent writing preposterous cover
letters had this realization not dawned upon me. The mental and psychological
costs of browsing through choices are immense, particularly when you are
required to repeatedly weigh the options of hating your job against not having
one. The opportunity cost in terms of time is the loss of some serious
youtubing.
Being neo-rational, I’m a strong believer in making
decisions based on empirical evidence. I often toss an unbiased coin. Needless
to say the coin can’t come to my rescue this time. Too much of anything in a
non-theoretical world is bad. Listen to the old wise men who bothered to write
proverbs that you could use when you don’t know how to end a blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment