2005年 金融时报的文章，有一定难度，不仅仅是句子结构、文章结构，还有文章介绍的经济学概念、社会学概念，甚至是悖论概念。很值得一读。

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Choice Words on Having Too Much Choice

Human beings are not adept at making decisions. Three academics try to explain why we rarely gain from a pick-and-choose society, writes James Harkin. -- James Harkin

1.Seven years ago, a skinny American political theorist called Barry Schwartz strolled into The Gap in search of a new pair of jeans. It took cardinal error of entering into dialogue with a salesperson and was in turn bombarded with a bewildering array of choices -- slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, extra baggy. The selection was endless and, at least daunting. But he tried them all on, just in case.

2.Schwartz emerged from his afternoon in The Gap with a pair of “easy fit” jeans and grudge against the easy pervasiveness of choice in contemporary societies. “Before these options are available,” he tells us on the second page of his cultishly influential book The Paradox of Choice, “a buyer like myself had to settle for an imperfect fit but at least purchasing jeans was a five-minute affair. Now it was a complex decision in which I was forced to invest time, energy and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety and dread.”

3.We might well have an abundance of options, he argues, but that multiplicity of choice conceals within it hidden costs. Against the ideology that glorifies our freedom to choose, Schwartz proceeds to throw up all kinds of clever objections and disastrous consequences -- our decisions, our regret when we make the wrong choices, the congestion that can result when all of us want the same thing, and out inability to being liberated by the banquet of choices available to us, he concludes, we have become enslaved, tyrannized and paralyzed by it.

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