No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice

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Between 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.

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Contents

Chapter 1 A World of Choice
1
Chapter 2 Good Choices and Bad Outcomes
17
Chapter 3 Private Choices and Public Failures
34
Chapter 4 Arms Races and Red Queens
65
Chapter 5 Cooperation and Its Limits
77
Chapter 6 Divide and Conquer
101
Chapter 7 That Obscure Object of Desire
114
Chapter 8 Join or Get Run Over
126
Chapter 9 The Devil You Know
162
Chapter 10 Free to Choose but Exploited
191
Chapter 11 Beyond Whimsley
203
Notes
219
Bibliography
225
Index
231
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About the author (2006)

Tom Slee writes about technology, politics, and economics and in the last two years has become a leading critic of the sharing economy. He has a PhD in theoretical chemistry, a long career in the software industry, and his book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart is a game-theoretical investigation of individual choice that has been used in university economics, philosophy and sociology courses. He lives in Waterloo, Canada and blogs at www.tomslee.net.

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