How is it proof positive that capitalism is imperfect?

I think it's proof positive that capitalism will eventually produce a product for every niche interest or need.

Hell, you even have a choice in how many choices you have. If you don't like the big-box places like Wal-Mart, shop at a boutique or special-interest place where your options are more limited.

I'm close to several people who have to abide by strict, sometimes peculiar diets. The fact that there are so many options available to them at the grocery store that once weren't is a blessing, not a curse.

When one considers all that mankind has struggled to overcome -- indeed what a market econonmy has enabled him to overcome (famine, poverty, disease, etc.), "choice paralysis" and "depressing psychic effects" come off as pretty petty, don't they?

It's proof that capitalism American style doesn't lead to a perfectly efficient outcome.

I think the problem here is that you're taking choice=good as axiomatic, when there really needs to be some consideration of why choice is good, and whether you can quantify that. One sensible analytical framework (the one championed by economics) is that choice gives you the chance to pick items that give you more utility and leave the reset behind. But this benefit is quantifiable, and if there are additional costs associated with having more choices (the time you hbave to spend deciding which one is better, etc) then these need to be subtracted from the benefit... I don't know where this math leads in the big picture (ie capitalism vs non-capitalism), but it's easy to see how there could be cases where more choice was actually less efficient than less choice, because the costs of making the choice or getting the information you need to make a choice could outweigh the benefits in getting the item that's cheaper or that you like better.

But, Paul, don't you think that the time a person takes to make a choice is directly correlated with how important the choice is to him/her? I mean, if I don't really care about the relative benefits of toothpaste, I will just buy the cheapest one, and that takes about 5 seconds to determine. But if I have a special need to address, it might be worth taking that extra time to get the right product. So...choice is good, because it should never cost me more time than I think is reasonable to get the product that will satisfy me.

Two things Sarah. First of all it's not always so easy to determine which is the cheapest price, even with toothpaste, so there can be choice-related inefficiency even there. But the other thing (and this is what the original article was trying to get at) is that there can be decision related stress -- ie people worrying that they are making the wrong choice.

Generally, at least in the U.S., the per-unit (ounces in the case of toothpaste)price is printed on the shelf label. Easy as pie to read. And as far as decision-related stress is concerned, if people are getting that stressed out over toothpaste they need to get a grip! Seriously, though...I think my point still stands...the stress should only be in proportion to how important the decision is. In choosing a house or a car, the stress is high, but reasonably so, considering the impact of the choice. With toothpaste, the cost of making the wrong choice is minimal in the extreme, so if a person is that stressed out over the decision, perhaps the problem is with the individual, not the system that is offering the choices.

On the toothpaste -- what's hard is not reading theshelves in one store, but reading the shelves in ALL of them, on the internet, etc. If you care about nothing but the price, I suppose it's still not that hard, OK. But even if you spend one minute deciding, at $15/hr (just to pull a number out of the air) that's $.25 of your time. If you linger, the number gets to be significant.

While I agree that people should figure out how to manage their own stress, there's still reason to sympathize with this kind of choice related neurosis. The whole toothpaste industry, like many other consumer products industries, is about finding ways to make people think all the products are different, finding a way to make people believe that THIS tube of toothpaste is different, and that you need it as a result. It's not really surprising that this kind of advertising might stress you out -- if you believe what you hear, then you might start to think it's vitally important (to your health, or how about even your daughter's health) to have whatever newfangled feature is on that tube in front of you. And how do you as a consumer compare the plaque fighting tube with the non plaque fighting tube? There's a serious information assymetry there, and the consumer can't realistically be expected to catch up.

Anyway the point is not that this needs to be fixed by the government necessarily, but that there are built in inefficiencies that you can't just dismiss (as Radley Balko did) in the face of the perfect system that we have, because our system isn't perfect. When you're talking about toothpaste, the effect is small, but of course it's going to be small, given than you're talking about toothpaste!

Oh, I certainly agree that the system has inefficencies...there's no such thing as a perfect system, especially where human behavior is a factor.

You are right that often the key to marketing is to convince you that the product they are selling is different (not even so sure that BETTER is all that relevant to marketers any more...they are just trying to find a new positioning element). Being part of the giant marketing machine myself, it is maybe easier for me to see that about 95% of it is B.S. (There is a book out I've been meaning to read called "All Marketers are Liars", written by a marketer.) So, I don't worry too much about relative benefits for about 95% of the stuff I buy, even when it comes to products purchased for my baby...I actually buy store-brand diapers! The horror! :-)