No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual ChoiceBetween the Lines, 2006 - 240 pages We live in a culture of choice. But, in an age of corporate dominance, our freedom to choose has taken on new meaning. Upset with your local big box store? Object to unfair hiring practices at your neighbourhood fast food restaurant? Want to protest the opening of that new multinational coffeeshop? Vote with your feet! What if it's not that simple? In No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, Tom Slee unpacks the implications of our fervent belief in the power of choice. Pointing out that individual choice has become the lynchpin of a neoconservative corporate ideology he calls MarketThink, he urges us to re-examine our assumptions . Slee makes use of game theory to argue that individual choice is not inherently bad. Nor is it the societal fix-all that our corporations and governments claim it is. A spirited treatise, this book will make you think about choice in a whole new way. |
From inside the book
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Page 20
... story of Jack and Wal - Mart , there is no trick here . There are ways of reaching hap- pier outcomes , but they involve going outside the rules of the story to include agreements between the players , external rewards , or threats . of ...
... story of Jack and Wal - Mart , there is no trick here . There are ways of reaching hap- pier outcomes , but they involve going outside the rules of the story to include agreements between the players , external rewards , or threats . of ...
Page 23
... story . The virtue of an abstract approach is that , by reducing the problem to one of numbers in a table , we can see how the same logic applies to many different stories . Instead of the table being a convenience to understand the story ...
... story . The virtue of an abstract approach is that , by reducing the problem to one of numbers in a table , we can see how the same logic applies to many different stories . Instead of the table being a convenience to understand the story ...
Page 124
... story as com- pelling as that of the competitive market should not stop us from rec- ognizing the importance of externalities , and seeing how blinkered the MarketThink worldview is . Presenting the free market as " the way the world ...
... story as com- pelling as that of the competitive market should not stop us from rec- ognizing the importance of externalities , and seeing how blinkered the MarketThink worldview is . Presenting the free market as " the way the world ...
Contents
A World of Choice | 1 |
Good Choices and Bad Outcomes | 17 |
Private Choices and Public Failures | 34 |
Copyright | |
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No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual ... Tom Slee Limited preview - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
Adidas Akerlof argue arms race become behaviour benefit best choice best reply better big-box stores Bill and Adrian buy Nike cent choose Club co-operation co-ordination game collective action common companies competition consumers corporations cost countries culture decision defection Dirty Pretty Things dominant drive Economics economists employees end result equilibrium outcome example externalities factors Figure free exchange free-rider problem game theory graph happy herbicide herd choices idea ideal gas identity incentives increasing returns individual choice industry Jack and Jill Jack's Kranton look market for lemons MarketThink ment move movie Nike offer option payoff person play player points pollution preferences prisoner's dilemma Roundup Ready side sidewalks situation sneakers society Spider-Man Star Wars story strategy success temptation things thinking tion Tit-for-Tat ultimatum game utility Wal-Mart walk Whimsley Whimsley Park word-of-mouth