He does a great job of outlining the problem, but the only solution he suggests is spectacularly wrong. He says that redistribution of income will make us (those with "too much" income) happier because it will narrow our choices. But it won't. The great thing about money is that you can buy anything with it, including the reduction in number of choices. The cachet for many companies (e.g. Apple, Costco) is exactly that: consistently high quality and limited selection.
And it always costs extra.
My biggest motivation for getting rich is not having to deal with insignificant (but unavoidable if you're poor) everyday problems. Being forced to choose is mostly a subset of those problems.
wow, this guy made it to TED? I saw him give this talk at penn, where he argued that we should never "maximize" (spend a lot of time researching) any decision, even seemingly important ones. The example he gave was a professional tennis player who, contrary to popular opinion, shouldn't "maximize" on a tennis racket because the psychological burden of doing all that research outweighed the marginal gain you'd get from buying a super-racket instead of some normal good racket. I also remember he was very unconvincing because that line of reasoning often leads to bad decisions (and rejecting it is what hacking's all about).
