Time for the Turkey Day OTB Caption Contest^TM

(AFP/Saul Loeb)

Happy Thanksgiving All

Winners will be announced Monday PM

Winners to last Monday’s contest will be announced some time on Friday

“Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday did not rule out running for president alongside Fox News host Glenn Beck in 2012,” Andy Barr reports for Politico.

Palin was asked during an interview with Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” about the chances that she “would run on a ticket with Fox’s own Glenn Beck,” as the conservative outlet Newsmax reported might be a possibility in 2012.

“I saw that, I saw that; he probably got a kick out of that,” Palin said. “It was just a hoot, too, to hear such a thing.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Palin did not specifically tell Newsmax that she was considering a run with Beck but did tout the controversial television and radio host as “bold” during her interview with the conservative magazine.

Glenn Beck, I have great respect for,” she said. “He gets his message across in such a clever way.”  “He calls it like he sees it, and he’s very, very, very effective,” Palin added.

This is one of those silly stories that circulates from time to time.  But a Palin-Beck ticket would certainly energize the race!  And assure that I don’t vote for the Republican presidential ticket, breaking a string of seven straight going back to 1984.

Wednesday’s column by Maureen Dowd, eviscerating President Obama for his shabby treatment of former White House Counsel Greg Craig and supporter Caroline Kennedy, is getting favorable responses from his supporters in the blogosphere.

Only a year after he had helped Barack Obama get elected by eviscerating his close friend, Clinton White House colleague and Yale Law School classmate, Hillary Clinton, Craig was himself eviscerated by the Obama inner circle.

[...]

I often wondered if Craig and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, the other former Clinton official who helped undermine Hillary’s foreign policy record, would have done so if they had known that after turning on Hillary they would once more end up working beside her; if they had known that Obama can often be more interested in wooing opponents than tending to those who put themselves on the line for him.

There were complaints that Craig was out of the loop, but couldn’t Obama have walked the single West Wing staircase up to his counsel’s office and looped him in?

Craig was, after all, simply defending positions that Obama himself took during the campaign, from closing Gitmo to greater transparency.

The way the Craig matter was handled sent a chill through some Obama supporters, reminding them of the icy manner in which the Clintons cut loose Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier. But then, Obama is surrounded by many old Clinton hands (and a Clinton).

[...]

Although a handful of donors were invited to the premiere state dinner Tuesday night — as well as erstwhile allies Craig and Hillary — many donors and passionate supporters are let down by Obama’s detachment, puzzled at his failure to make them feel invested when he’s certain to come back to tap their well soon enough.

It is especially puzzling given that Obama faces tough midterms and a less-than-certain re-election — and given that we all now know someone on the unemployment line. (A new poll shows Obama and Sarah Palin neck and neck among independents, but then it is a Fox survey.)

Bill Clinton may not have cared any more about contributors than Obama does, but he was such a talented politician that he made them feel as though they were in “a warm bath,” as one put it.

Obama is more like a cold shower.

Steve Clemons, himself treated to Obama’s dismissiveness after serving as an advisor during the campaign, says the piece “shows why she is such a key part of high quality political journalism” by “pushing the Obama administration in the way stand up journalists should” even if it means being cut out of the loop.

M.J. Rosenberg remains “Obama supporter who has no regrets whatsoever about supporting him in the primaries and the general last year.”  But he’s nonetheless “disappointed in the people advising him and think a staff shakeup is overdo, starting with the Cabinet and working right down to the White House staff.”  Why, “If I wanted Team Clinton back, I’d have supported Hillary. Instead (as Hillary predicted) we have the same operator/operatives that Bill hired and Hillary would have hired had she been elected.”

The most interesting response is from Andrew Sullivan, both a fierce Obama supporter and yet one who both disagrees with him on several key issues and approaches politics with much more passion.

Dowd’s instincts about human character are foolish to bet against. She has essentially read every recent president correctly from the get-go as types. And she has always seen Obama as a bit of a cold fish, aloof, too unwilling to punch back, too arrogant to explain himself too much.

[...]

You see this in the almost clinical way Obama has assessed the politics of taking on the Bush administration’s interrogation, detention and rendition policies. The way in which both Greg Craig and Phil Carter have been dispatched for insisting that Obama live up to his campaign promises (no, I don’t believe the personal reasons line) is chilling in its raw political calculation. Ditto Obama’s disciplined refusal to fulfill his campaign pledges on civil rights any time soon. And his rhetorical restraint during the Green Revolution. The determination to figure out the very best and most detailed way forward in Afghanistan, even during a war in which allies are waiting and enemies are watching, and to take his time … well this is also a sign that we are dealing with one very, very cool character here.

Since I’ve always had a soft spot for cold fish in realpolitik – which high Tory (pun fully intended) doesn’t get a frisson from Bismarck or Kissinger? – this impresses me. Since I’m also a red-blooded Irishman, eager for a fight and a little romantic about my ideals, this also angers me at times.

[...]

In all this, Obama reminds me of George H W Bush in government, and of Ronald Reagan in campaigning. It’s a dream combo in many ways. In theory. It’s the practice thing that we’re beginning to test. My sense remains the same as in the campaign. He’s got this.

Interestingly, while I’m the reverse of Sullivan at the outset — I strongly opposed Obama’s election, can’t imagine voting for his re-election, and tend to be more detached in my political analysis — I think he’s on the right track here.

Some months back, I had and interesting conversation with Dave Schuler about this very thing on our OTB Radio podcast.   We both agreed that Obama showed an amazingly quick trigger in dumping allies who were politically inconvenient.  From Jeremiah Wright or Samantha Power or Bill Richardson or Tom Daschle, he didn’t hesitate to cut the cord rather than have them drag him down.   While I found this quality distasteful, Dave found it a necessary quality of effective leadership.

We were both right.

As much as I admired Obama’s predecessor for his loyalty to his people — indeed, he valued loyalty above almost all else in choosing them — it no doubt was a major factor in sinking his presidency.  He’d have undoubtedly been more successful had he more quickly dispatched Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Brown, and others.  Had he sacrificing them, he would have distanced himself from unpopular policies and been able to move on.

Sully’s right that there’s a danger that Obama’s aloofness will result in his base being less energized than it was in 2008.  But, frankly, unless he’s running against Sarah Palin, that’s going to be the case, anyway.  He’s not running against the backdrop of an incredibly unpopular incumbent nor is he vying to make history.  And he’ll have four years of decisions weighing him down, so there won’t be as much Hope or Change in the air.    But I agree with Andrew that Obama has to be considered the odds-on favorite unless we still have double digit unemployment in 2012.

Josh Marshall argues that bad picks by Democratic governors in filling vacant seats make it harder than necessary to retain those seats.

I was just looking at this run-down of recent polls by Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling. The upshot is that while it seems extremely unlikely Republicans could regain control of the senate next year, it’s not impossible and they look well positioned to make a big dent in the Dems’ majority in the upper chamber.

Most of this has to do with the factors we know about — a bad economy, a charged up right-wing, President Obama’s decline in popularity. But looking more closely at the races something else stood out to me: just how many of the vulnerable seats are ones where bad or questionable picks by Democratic governors have put Democrats in an unnecessarily weak position.

To be clear, not all of these are bad candidates/incumbent senators. But politically they’re all very weak — probably unnecessarily so given the states they come from.

The ones that stand out are Beau Biden in Delaware, yet to be determined in Illinois, Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, and Michael Bennet in Colorado.

[...]

Some of these picks stemmed from personal idiosyncrasies, others unique personal situations. But all were made in the post-2008 political climate when the Democratic ascendancy seemed to flow into an endless future. And the Dems could pay a real price.

Josh admits that there may not have been better candidates to fill the seats in question but he’s frustrated that considerations other than selecting the candidate best able to defend the seat in 2010 were a factor.  And that’s a reasonable enough argument.  Especially since the seats in question would be quite safe had Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Ken Salazar not vacated them prematurely to take seats in the Obama administration.

At the same time, however, I’d note that the Republican candidates to fill these vacancies don’t have the advantage of incumbency.  And they’re presumably running uphill fights, given that Democrats so recently won these seats.

The BEA has revised its estimates for the third quarter’s growth down to 2.8% from 3.5%. This is also a bit below the expected growth of 2.9% for the quarter.

The main factors behind the downgrade: consumers didn’t spend as much, commercial construction was weaker and the nation’s trade deficit was more of a drag on growth. Businesses also trimmed more of their stockpiles, another restraining factor.

[…]

Still, the good news is that the economy finally started to grow again, after a record four straight losing quarters. The bad news is that the rebound, now and in the months ahead, probably will be lethargic.

The worst recession since the 1930s is very likely over, but the economy’s return to good health will take time, Fed officials and economists say.

So much for the strong, above normal growth that some have predicted. Not sure why they predicted this given that the last two recessions have followed this pattern. Yes, recessions from earlier decades tended to show higher than average growth, but that no longer seems to hold.

I like Arnold Kling’s recalculation view of the economy. Arnold explains the notion of recalculation thus,

But I think that the simplifying assumption of homogeneous output, labor, and capital is equally dangerous. My claim (which is not original with me–it is recognizably Austrian) is that a recession can be thought of as a recalculation. Imagine a central planner who decides to radically change plans. He has a huge recalculation to make in order to figure out where to allocate labor and capital. He says to some people, “Wait a minute. I am thinking. Some of you just have to stand idle while I figure this out.”

The market economy is like that central planner. We are undergoing a Great Recalculation.

Greg Mankiw brought this issue up by referring to the possibility of a unit root. In statistical models a unit root means that when you have a change it is permanent. To tie it to the current situation, if we have over invested in housing, then it is unlikely we can ever get back to where we were before the bubble bursts. This doesn’t mean we can’t have growth or even robust growth, but it isn’t going to be like previous recessions and recoveries a sharp decline in unemployment and output followed by and approximately equal rebound and then return to trend. We might simply return to trend from the lower level of unemployment and output. The following graph shows the two situations.

Kling continues,

In macro, we teach that there are different types of unemployment: structural unemployment, where there is a mismatch between skills and needs; frictional unemployment, where the skills and jobs match up in theory, but in practice people are stuck in the search process having not yet found the right match; and cyclical unemployment, where people are unemployed because of inadequate aggregate demand.

If Kling is right, then we are going to see structural unemployment because the economy is undergoing a structural change. Moving resources between sectors of the economy, and as a result we’ll likely see more people in the mismatch of skills problem than cyclical unemployment.

Back to Kling,

Up until about 1980, most of the unemployment in a recession was unemployment that I would recognize as cyclical. However, certainly since 2000, most of the unemployment has not met my definition of cyclical.

The old-fashioned inventory recessions involved one class of miscalculations–firms over-produced relative to demand, and then had to cut back for a while. Those miscalculations are less important today, in part because computerized inventory and integrated supply chains tighten the connection between production plans and reality, and in part because a lot of the actual production of stuff for U.S. consumption is done overseas, so our inventory miscalculations affect foreign workers relatively more and U.S. workers relatively less.

So while the stimulus might have lessened the impact of the recession, I don’t think it would ever get us back to the blue line. The only way to do that would be to have incredibly massive stimulus which is just not possible nor would it be sustainable.

Nick Schultz points us to this interesting graphic on the private sector experience of presidential cabinets:

The chart “”includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.”

If this is accurate, it is indeed truly “remarkable.” Schultz notes that “public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population,” so this isn’t the explanation. Yes, Democratic presidents have tended toward people with public sector backgrounds — for reasons perfectly understandable given their ideology — but only by a somewhat higher margin than Republicans.

But it’s almost incomprehensible that 90 percent of Obama’s administration would have no private sector experience. What in the world have they been doing the last eight years, when they presumably weren’t in appointed positions?

Katherine Mangu-Ward offers a plausible explanation: “Part of the reason for the dramatic dip could be Obama’s “no revolving door” policy. The new rules aim to keep lobbyists out of his government but may wind up functioning as a screen for all manner of folks with private sector experience on the CVs.”

Story link via memeorandum.

Full disclosure: I published, and was paid for, a goodly number of pieces at Tech Central Station/TCS Daily when Nick was editor.

Google looked like a monkey after its algorithms had an unfortunate result for searches for photos of the First Lady.

For most of the past week, when someone typed “Michelle Obama” in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.

On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for “Michelle Obama.”

Google officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Google faced a firestorm of criticism over the episode. First, it banned the Web site that posted the photo, saying it could spread a malware virus. Then, when the image appeared on another Web site, Google let the photo stand. When a Google image search brought up the photo, an apologetic Google ad occasionally appeared above it.

The ad redirected users to a statement from Google which read, “Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.”

Guardian’s Mark Sweeney has a more detailed explanation:

The image, which has been appearing at the top of search results when the words “Michelle Obama” are put into Google Images, was posted on a blog called Hot Girls, which is hosted by the Google-owned blog service, Blogger.

Hot Girls’ owner has today removed the image, which appears to have originally been put up with a blog post on 21 October, and displayed an apology in Chinese with a very loose English translation.

Google had refused to remove the offensive image from its picture search listings, despite complaints that it is racist, instead opting to run an ad next to it explaining its policy on how search engine results work.

A spokesman for Google said that the Hot Girls blog and image may still temporarily appear when some users make Google Images searches but that it was coming out of the search engine’s indexing system.

The company has been unusually responsive in this case, and understandably so.  But the fact of the matter is that its Image Search, while simply amazing in many respects (I use it all the time for photos to illustrate posts at OTB), is subject to the same manipulation as its text search results.   Indeed, it’s hard to search for anything at all — but especially people’s names — and not find plenty of dubious results.

Photo credit:  Island Crisis

I’ve canceled tonight’s installment of of OTB Radio, our weekly BlogTalkRadio program.

My co-host Dave Schuler is understandably unable to participate after the recent loss of his mother, who will be laid to rest Saturday, and I’m in no mood to go on without him.

The next episode will air on Wednesday, December 2nd.

Our colleague Dave Schuler lost his mother Sunday.   My  sincere condolences.

Dave eulogizes her in brief, moving fashion:

I have lost my oldest friend, my first teacher, and my most inspirational life model. My mother has died at 88.

One of my core beliefs is that the best way to preserve someone you love who has died in your heart is to do the things that person would have wanted to do. From this day forward I hope that, in addition to seeing, hearing, loving, and acting for myself, I will see with my mother’s eyes, hear with her ears, love with her heart, and act with her courage and joy.

It’s a tall order. She was and for me will always remain a great human being, one of the very best I have ever known.

May she rest in peace.

Photo from Mrs. Schuler’s appearance on NPR’s wonderful StoryCorps program, talking with her eldest daughter (and Dave’s sister).  Dave has the audio archived here.

In discussing legal possibilities vs. tradition vis a vis the Senate filibuster rules, Matthew Yglesias pens an interesting legal scenario.

After all, a lot of things are possible in our system. To the best of my understanding, nothing is stopping Rahm Emannuel from sauntering onto the floor of the Senate, murdering Republicans from states with Democratic governors in cold blood, having them replaced by new Democrats, and then getting a pardon from Barack Obama.

But that would obviously be a sharp break with the traditions of our government!

Indeed it would.

By the way, nobody mention this legal scenario to Glenn Beck. Let the man enjoy a good night’s sleep once in awhile.

Surely no matter whether we identify as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, we can all agree with President Obama’s statement regarding robotics.

Now, the students from Oakton High School are going to be demonstrating the Cougar Cannon designed to scoop up and toss moon rocks. I am eager to so what they do, for two reasons. As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.

I stand with this Administration and its opposition to a robot takeover.

Phil Carter, well known to longtime denizens of the blogosphere as the former proprietor of Intel Dump, has suddenly resigned as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy. The NYT buries this news on A20:

The Defense Department official in charge of closing the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has resigned after only seven months in the job, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Phillip Carter, who was named deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy in April, resigned last Friday because of “personal issues,” a Pentagon official said. Mr. Carter could not be reached for comment and no other reasons were given for his departure.

Mr. Carter, 34, a lawyer and an Army adviser to the Iraqi police in Baquba in 2005 and 2006, was in charge of veterans outreach in President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Mr. Carter’s departure comes as the administration has acknowledged that it will not be able to close the prison by Jan. 22, the self-imposed deadline Mr. Obama announced immediately after taking office.

Mr. Carter has also left in the middle of the administration’s efforts to prosecute some of the Guantánamo detainees and find a location in the United States to house perhaps 50 to 100 terrorism suspects indefinitely. The Cuba prison now has 215 detainees.

Phil’s extraordinarily talented, having reached such an exalted position at a very young age through hard work rather than connections.  He is an autodidact expert on terrorism and related matters, having established himself as not only a leading blog authority on the subject but one who was regularly published in Slate, the Washington Post (which later enticed Phil to move his blog to their space) and elsewhere.   One of the best thoughtful critics of the Iraq War, he was called to active duty from the Army Reserves and served there ably and honorably as a captain.

While the timing of Phil’s departure suggests a principled political opposition to Obama policy, the “personal issues” could be real rather than a polite dodge.  Glenn Greenwald has some not unreasonable speculation on the former front.

I have no idea what actually motivated Carter’s abrupt resignation, but here’s what I do know:  so many of the detention and other “War on Terror” policies Obama has explicitly adopted were the very same ones which Carter (as well as Obama) repeatedly railed against during the Bush years, in Carter’s case primarily in blogs he maintained both at The Washington Post and at Slate.  Whatever else is true, the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter’s responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.

Greenwald spends the next several paragraphs laying out that case in a very convincing manner.

Ironically, given that Phil was a relatively senior appointee in the administration, my position on these issues is closer to the president’s than his.  But this is perhaps the most substantive issue area in which President Obama most sharply differs from Candidate Obama.  From my perspective, this is a classic case of a naive candidate being hit with reality when confronted with the reality of being responsible for America’s national security and I applaud the president for alienating his base rather than doing the wrong thing.  But for a true believer, I could see how the dashing of Hope and lack of Change could be too much to bear.

UPDATE:  Noah Schachtman, a mutual acquaintance and good friend of Phil’s, talked to him on the phone and was told, “I made this tough decision for personal reasons, even though I loved the job and the work we were doing. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to serve again.”   Phil says the same in an email to me.   I see no reason to doubt his word.

Laura Rozen thinks it’s odd that Phil hasn’t been more specific.  Maybe he’s operating under the presumption that the details are none of our business.

Remember the bizarre case of Bill Sparkman, the census worker found hanging from a tree in Kentucky with the letters FED scrawled on his chest?  Remember the media frenzy about crazy Southerners and their hatred of the federal government?  At the time, I cautioned against jumping to conclusions, saying there could be any number of explanations.  I also agreed with Andrew Sullivan that suicide was unlikely given what we then knew about Sparkman.

Well, it turns out, the unlikely explanation was the right one.

A Kentucky census worker found naked, bound with duct tape and hanging from a tree with “fed” scrawled on his chest killed himself but staged his death to make it look like a homicide, authorities said Tuesday.

Bill Sparkman, 51, was found strangled Sept. 12 with a rope around his neck near a cemetery in a heavily wooded area of the Daniel Boone National Forest in southeastern Kentucky. Authorities said his wrists were loosely bound, his glasses were taped to his head and he was gagged.

Kentucky State Police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said an analysis found that “fed” was written “from the bottom up.” He was touching the ground, and to survive “all Mr. Sparkman had to do at any time was stand up,” she said. Authorities said Sparkman was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of his death. His clothes were found in the bed of his nearby pickup. “Our investigation, based on evidence and witness testimony, has concluded that Mr. Sparkman died during an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide,” Rudzinski said.

[...]

Authorities said Sparkman alone manipulated the suicide scene, which was so elaborate that a man who discovered the body was convinced Sparkman was murdered.

Rudzinski said Sparkman “told a credible witness that he planned to commit suicide and provided details on how and when.” Authorities wouldn’t say who Sparkman told of his plan, but said Sparkman talked about it a week before his suicide and the person did not take him seriously. He told the person he believed his lymphoma, which he had previously been treated for, had recurred, police said.

Sparkman also had recently taken out two accidental life insurance policies totaling $600,000 that would not pay out for suicide, authorities said. One policy was taken out in late 2008; the other in May. If Sparkman had been killed on the job, his family also would have been be eligible for up to $10,000 in death gratuity payments from the government.

Michelle Malkin wonders, “When will the Left retract the Kentucky census worker case smear against conservatives?”  Stacy McCain piles on:

Bill Sparkman committed suicide. So much for “Southern populist terrorism” — and the credibility of Andrew Sullivan. So much for “Send the body to Glenn Beck” — and the credibility of Rick Ungar.

But at least some on the Left are quickly getting the word out.  Zachary Roth at TPM writes, “Sparkman deliberately played on rural Kentucky’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-government sentiment to create the impression that he had been murdered because of his job.”  TLOOG’s Mark Thompson adds,

After all the speculation that the death of a census worker was fueled by anti-government extremismand how the Tea Party movement (whatever its faults) was a vanguard for a violent anti-government uprising, it now appears that the killing was a suicide made to look like a homicide so the man’s family could collect a substantial life insurance payout.  This is a saddening portrait of a deeply troubled man in deeply troubled times. It is not, however, evidence that anti-government activists are uniquely violent.

When information is scant, we tend to fill in the gaps based on our prejudices about how the world works.  On the whole, it’s a completely reasonable thing to do.  Indeed, the nature of wisdom is the ability to extrapolate from what we’ve learned.   But sometimes jumping to conclusions bites you in the ass.

Story links: memeorandum

So says the latest Quinnipiac poll. Headlines like that are a major part of why I really hope Sen. Chris Dodd gets shellacked next year. As his ethical troubles have mounted, it’s gone from a minor, ir-regular irritant to an almost-daily source of annoyance.

Sadly, even with such headlines, he almost assuredly lacks the introspection or good sense to step aside gracefully (or even rather ungraciously like, say, Jim Bunning):

Sen. Dodd suffers from what we call Barbara Kennelly Syndrome, a fatal political affliction named after the former congresswoman and “proven Democratic vote-getter” who got her clocked cleaned when she ventured out of her safe district in 1998 to challenge then-Gov. John Rowland. After all, Sen. Dodd’s presidential bid failed spectacularly in 2008; meanwhile, he’s never had anything resembling the sort of tough re-election fight he faces in 2010. But to suggest Sen. Dodd might “get out gracefully” for the good of his party or accept a face-saving appointment as U.S. ambassador to Venezuela vastly underestimates his ego and fails to account for what drives the man.

[...]

[H]e can’t quit because that would be interpreted as an admission of guilt, and his permanent stain would outlive him. No, voters’ approbation — re-election — is the best spot remover. They denied his father, corrupt Democratic Sen. Thomas Dodd, that vindication in 1970 after his censure by the Senate for stealing campaign donations to pay for personal expenses, and he died a broken man.

The memory of that disgrace drives his son. Sen. Dodd has spent his adult life trying to mend his father’s image while attempting to maintain a spotless record of his own. He has succeeded at neither, and without unambiguous victory in 2010, Sen. Dodd would be remembered most for his corruption and ethical bankruptcy. Like father, like son.

That would almost be a sad story if it weren’t so banal in its typicality. Here’s hoping the voters in Connectiut have finally had enough.

Tyler Cowen dubs the paradox of choice — the idea that people become unhappy when given too many choices — “one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences.”  He cites Tim Harford’s recent piece in FT describing research on the subject:

Is more choice better? Ten years ago the answer seemed obvious: Yes. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite: lots of choice makes people less likely to choose anything, and less happy when they do choose.

The most famous supporting evidence is an experiment conducted by two psychologists, Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar. They set up a jam-tasting stall in a posh supermarket in California. Sometimes they offered six varieties of jam, at other times 24; jam tasters were then offered a voucher to buy jam at a discount.

The bigger display attracted more customers but very few of them actually bought jam. The display that offered less choice made many more sales – in fact, only 3 per cent of jam tasters at the 24-flavour stand used their discount voucher, versus 30 per cent at the six-flavour stand. This is an astonishingly strong effect – and utterly counter to mainstream economic theory.

[...]

But a more fundamental objection to the “choice is bad” thesis is that the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.

But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.

When I saw that question at Kevin Drum’s place, the likely answer struck me as rather obvious.  Apparently, Kevin though so, too, since he came up with the same answer:

Perhaps the paradox of choice used to be true in simpler times, but the internet and the rest of modern life have taught us to revel in choice, rather than being intimidated by it.  In a related vein, maybe it’s a generational thing.  Maybe choice dazzles me more than it does a 20-something who grew up with 87 cell phone plans, 300 cable channels, and 1,000 Facebook friends.

Even aside from technology, we’re used to more choices.  Yes, we’ve gone from 3 TV channels to hundreds but also from 3 or 4 car manufacturers to a dozen, an almost infinite variety of coffees, ethnic restaurants, and many other things over the course of the past few years.

Kevin’s also right, I think, that our familiarity with the product in question matters.  It’s a bit of a chore to chose between seventeen brands of strawberry jam, for instance, but not all that complicated.  On the other hand, choosing a cell phone and accompanying plan — and being obligated for two years to live with that choice or pay heavy penalties — can be rather intimidating.

It also occurs to me that the original experiment may just demonstrate that people aren’t interested enough in jam to spend a lot of time comparison shopping.  So, unless they’ve run out and really need some more, they may bypass a giant display whereas choosing between, say, strawberry, grape, and cherry and then between Smuckers, Polander, and store brand makes impulse purchases more inviting.

Photo: Country Living