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The more complicated the decision, the more I want someone else to make it. A couple of years ago, I went to a specialist for advice about some headaches and weird sensations in my inner ear. After an examination, the doctor asked if I wanted an MRI. She would order it if I wanted, but would not insist on it. I did not want to make the decision—I wanted to say, “Look, you’re the doctor. You’re supposed to tell me whether I need an MRI.” Sometimes we want to be told what’s best. (I ended up having the MRI, which showed that my head was fine.)

We can be overwhelmed by much simpler and more mundane decisions than whether to get a brain scan. You’ll remember the jam experiment I mentioned in chapter two. Some shoppers were offered a large variety of jams to sample; others were offered only a few.15 The shoppers offered more options actually decided to make a purchase less often. They had more difficulty choosing. Shoppers offered fewer choices not only bought more jam, they were happier with the jams they chose. They worried less about whether they might have liked the boysenberry more than the raspberry. Even where our biology and situation give us a good amount of freedom, we are easily overwhelmed by choice.

It is only natural for our brains to look for shortcuts, to make as many decisions as possible without involving our higher faculties. In a complex world, worrying about everything is a recipe for mental illness. To avoid this, our brain understands the adage “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” When choices are complicated, unfamiliar, numerous, or overwhelming—from decisions about jam to brain scans—we need cognitive shortcuts and aids to make decisions.

Here is where advertising and other marketing efforts have their effect. In the free market, companies do not care whether we buy their product after making a cool, rational decision, balancing all the pros and cons. In fact they would prefer that we act out of compulsion, habit, or craving. If they can push our purchase decision from the conscious into the subconscious, from the considered to the habitual, they can rake in the cash.

Thus they have every incentive to find better ways to influence us. If they are really good at it, then the influences will be invisible to us. We’ll feel like we’re acting autonomously when we experience a Big Mac attack or put another coin in the slot machine. And if they are really good, they will not only influence us about ways to satisfy our preferences, they will create completely new preferences that only they can satisfy. They can manufacture our desire and then manufacture ways to satisfy it. How many of us knew we wanted iPhones before they existed? Now it’s hard to think of oneself as a member of the middle class without one.

My point here is that, contrary to economic theory and the rhetoric of marketers everywhere, markets are not a Garden of Eden of choice. Each of us depends on mental shortcuts, and we all delegate to our subconscious as much decision making as possible. In response, our subconscious becomes a battleground for all kinds of influences. In the free market, people and companies have every incentive to fight hard for this contested ground.

It is not that we have no control over what we buy, or that all of our tastes are manufactured. But the feeling of free will we have when we purchase something is often misleading. In fact, that feeling itself may be manufactured. From the standpoint of marketers, the perfect product is one that is purchased out of habit or compulsion, but which the purchaser feels he or she has exercised free will and rationality in choosing.

6.

In discussing how the so-called free market limits choice, we’ve thus far focused on scarcity and manipulation, both of which are inherent in markets. Markets also restrict choice because of their pervasiveness. Markets are so powerful that it is virtually impossible to opt out of them, even for things that our society does not want to allocate based on ability to pay.

I’ve mentioned several times by now my home town in Kentucky. My childhood