The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [51]
Clearly, Rensaleer was conflicted, and he was apologetic to the authority figure. But his empathy for the victim caused him to overcome his discomfort.
The experimenter pressed on: “There is no permanent tissue damage,” and “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” Rensaleer maintained his disobedience. The experimenter finally countered with “You have no other choice.”
Rensaleer turned indignant. “I do have a choice,” he asserted. “Why don’t I have a choice? I came here on my own free will. I thought I could help in a research project. But if I have to hurt somebody to do that, or if I was in his place, too, I wouldn’t stay there. I can’t continue. I’m very sorry. I think I’ve gone too far already, probably.”
After the experiment was called off, he was asked who was responsible for shocking the learner, before he had refused. Many of the other subjects had projected the responsibility onto the experimenter—it was his experiment, they said, and he insisted that the shocks continue. Rensaleer refused to do this. “I would put it on myself entirely . . . I should have stopped the first time he complained . . . I think [it] is very cowardly . . . to try to shove the responsibility onto someone else.”18
This is personal responsibility in its most genuine form. It is worth emulating.
“I do have a choice,” we can say.
6
Choice and the Free Market
There’s small choice in rotten apples.
—William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, c. 1590
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
—James Baldwin, 1961
WE ALL KNOW THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: the free market is the embodiment of robust, unlimited choice. That’s why it’s called the free market. In its current state, it lets us choose among approximately 45,000 items in the typical grocery store, millions of songs on iTunes, scores of vacuum cleaners at Best Buy, and more than twenty different flavors of Coca-Cola available in the United States alone. (The list includes such favorites as Coke Lime, Diet Coke Black Cherry Vanilla, Coca-Cola Citra, and Coca-Cola with Raspberry.)1 The free market allows us to spend our money on Snuggies to warm us while we watch television, nose-hair clippers to keep us well groomed, orthopedic dog beds to keep our pets comfortable, child-sized treadmills to ensure our off spring get their exercise, and products like the Electronic Feng Shui Compass that “locates and calculates energy fields,” allowing buyers to “align [their] physical surroundings to match [their] intentions.”2
The ability to buy or sell products without the approval of a feudal lord, parish priest, or mob boss is a mark of modernity and liberty. The ability to buy what we want is tied to our individualism; we define ourselves in part by what we buy. We can be a Hummer or a Prius; Old Navy or Brooks Brothers; Bud Light or Amstel Light; Xbox or Wii. I am a Suburu Outback, Banana Republic, Guinness, Playstation kind of guy. Once you know those preferences, you can guess many other things about me. After all, these market choices not only help us decide who we are, they also identify us to others.
The story of markets, whether supermarkets, flea markets, or capital markets, is a story of choice. The conventional wisdom is that markets embody and nurture choice, and choice embodies and nurtures markets. Often ignored is how markets constrain and limit choice.
1.
Here is the typical narrative of the free market. If people can freely choose, the theory goes, then they become better off over time. In a free market, no one forces us to buy the Snuggie (OK, I actually bought