Unhealthy choices

The other day Dr. Anthony Fauci, our coronavirus whisperer and guru, was asked which vaccine we should seek to receive.

“All three of them are really quite good, and people should take the one that’s most available to them,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

There are differences between the new Johnson & Johnson shot and the first two, but your health chances, and your community's chances, are way better when you get inoculated with any of them.

I sure hope we Americans can avoid making vaccine choice yet another of the soul-draining excess choices that conservative economic ideology has thrust on our lives. I'm old enough to remember when everyday living didn't force us to decide such things as which phone company to use, which cable and streaming services we wanted for video input, which Medicare drug plan to sign up with ...

It wasn't so bad actually. I for one am quite willing to forgo wide consumer choices in most everyday matters so long as I get a basic level of needed service.

Paul Krugman has a great recent column that highlights the less visible costs to many of us when the freedom to search out the cheapest or best choice merely adds to our debilitating stresses.

It’s true that both Economics 101 and conservative ideology say that more choice is always a good thing. Milton Friedman’s famous and influential 1980 TV series extolling the wonders of capitalism was titled “Free to Choose.” . 

... But the argument that more choice is always good rests on the assumption that people have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of their lives — and the real world isn’t like that. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live and limited ability to process information.

 ... There’s a growing body of research suggesting that the costs of poverty go beyond the trouble low-income families have in affording necessities. The poor also face a heavy “cognitive burden” — the constant need to make difficult choices that the affluent don’t confront, like whether to buy food or pay the rent. Because people have limited “bandwidth” for processing complex issues, the financial burdens placed on the poor all too often degrade their ability to make good decisions on other issues, sometimes leading to self-destructive life choices.

What I’m suggesting is that a society that turns what should be routine concerns into make-or-break decisions — a society in which you can ruin your life by choosing the wrong electric company or health insurer — imposes poverty-like cognitive burdens even on the middle class.

... And it’s all unnecessary. ... So the next time some politician tries to sell a new policy — typically deregulation — by claiming that it will increase choice, be skeptical. Having more options isn’t automatically good, and in America we probably have more choices than we should.

All this "choice" can be literally too much to bear. Carrying a "cognitive burden" that's good for marketers and corporate vendors does not enhance living for a lot of us. Even if what we're offered is not a scam (Krugman's main concern), it can be a distraction from living as we would hope to.