If you were a regular working or middle-class person in the era, there was very little chance you had ever gone halfway around the country, much less dreamed of going abroad on vacation. I don’t think we can underestimate how much bigger the world was in the 1930s than it is now. Another great limitation we probably don’t think about much today would have been how many other styles of swing dancing an original jitterbugger would have seen. This confinement to a certain style of music would have been a limitation, a box, that helped shape the dance. (This leads to another topic which will be discussed in part 4.) In thinking about the dancing life of the old timers, something perhaps deceptively important is how consistent the music would have been to an original dancer: any swing music you would have heard at the Savoy in 1939 would have pretty much the same feeling dancers didn’t have to change much about their pulse or style of dancing like a modern dancer, who might one moment be expected to dance to a 1925 Charleston song, the next a late period boogie woogie, and the next a 1950s Count Basie song, all of which ask for very different takes on the same basic movements.* I believe this meant an original dancer could get “into a groove” better throughout a night of dancing than a modern dancer might, not having to change the fundamental pulse and style hardly any at a night of dancing. ![]() This is the third part of an essay where I discuss the world of the original swing-era dancer a person that, in many ways, was probably not like you and me. (I hope to compose an updated version within the next few years.) That said, I have left it in its original form to serve as an example of where a brain like mine was at the time of its publication. This talk will review some of our limits as rational decision makers, with a focus on how giving people more options leads to paralysis rather than liberation, leads to poor decisions, and leads to dissatisfaction with even good decisions.Author’s note: As you read this essay, please note it was composed in 2010, and though I believe the main ideas are still valid, I would make several different choices in how I present it were I writing it today. Forty years of research in behavioral economics has shown that /some/ people behave that way /some/ of the time, but that most of us are only semi-rational decision-makers. They figure out what they want, and then find the option that comes closest to achieving their goals–that “maximizes” their utility. ![]() Insights from Behavioral Economics: People as Semi-Rational ChoosersĮconomists have long assumed that human beings are rational choosers. Schwartz has spoken three times at the TED conference, and his TED talks have been viewed by more than 16 million p eople. He has appeared on dozens of radio shows, including NPR’s Morning Edition, and Talk of the Nation, and has been interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN), the PBS News Hour, The Colbert Report, and CBS Sunday Morning. Schwartz has written for sources as diverse as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, Scientific American, The New Republic, the Harvard Business Review, and the Guardian. The Paradox of Choice was named one of the top business books of the year by both Business Week and Forbes Magazine, and has been translated into twenty-five languages. He has written several books that address aspects of this interaction, including The Battle for Human Nature, The Costs of Living, The Paradox of Choice, Practical Wisdom, and most recently, Why We Work. His TED talks have been watched by over 23 million people, he’s written 9 bestselling books, and is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore college.īarry Schwartz has spent forty years thinking and writing about the interaction between economics and morality. Barry Schwartz is one of the most influential psychologists in the world.
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