Now it’s my turn to disagree. Not to the idea that there are too many school districts — I have no way to measure the optimum balance between the value of competition and the efficiency of consolidation — but to the notion that "too many choices" can ultimately make us worse-off.
David Stokes links to a New Yorker review of Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, noting that when faced with an ever-growing variety of products from which to choose, "at some point, the variety of choices leads to diminishing returns." I don’t dispute that this can be the case — for a majority of people, most of the time, even — but that this is no argument for artificial elimination of any of those choices.
Sometimes eliminating choices is a business strategy that makes sense. Some restaurants are getting rid of menus, some supermarkets are paring down the number of items on their shelves, and the Internet is filled with advice on how to make decisions effectively — suggesting that there’s a wide range of people out there that needs help coping with the bewildering array of choices life has to offer them.
So, yes, I grant all of this. And yet … it’s easy to forget that the long tail has become the basis for the most valuable new business plans of the Internet age. The idea here is that people have such widely varied tastes that the many items people buy very little of, with low market share, add up to a mass of options that rivals the popular items that nearly everybody buys.
Schwartz coined a couple of terms for different types of deision-makers: "maximizers" and "satisficers."
