What colour clothes are you wearing today? And did you take time in the morning to look at yourself in the mirror and match your outfit to your mood... or to the weather? Or did you just throw them on?
Choices are all around us. The decisions we make, whether big or small, are how we make our mark on the world around. But can we have a better choice of choice?
For consumer advocates like myself, choice has long been a 'good thing'. We haven't questioned it, we haven't worried about it... we just wanted more of it. People themselves, we argued, are the best interpreters of their own needs and circumstances.
If more is not always better, who decides where there should be less choice?
But two factors have started to question and qualify the way that I now view consumer choice. And in both cases, academic research has played a significant role.
The first concern is what Herman Daly has called 'the wild facts' of environmental loss. The limits of what we can put into or take out of nature are now well documented. If our choices are unsustainable, then there are clear limits to choice.
The second factor is about people themselves and how choice fits into their consumer behaviour and preferences. A wealth of evidence, from behavioural economics to social psychology to market research, shows that choice is not simple. We use short-cuts, routines and emotion to chart our way through the decisions we face. Indeed, we often don't like the effort of making choices.
So, today's world may have changed, in the sheer complexity of choices on offer, but people have not. The early twentieth century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead probably got it right when he said that "civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them".
Here, however, is the challenge. If more is not always better, who decides where there should be less choice? This is a question I picked up with colleagues from the consumer, commercial and academic worlds in a recent roundtable on 'sustainable consumption'.
First, we found that to date most environmental policies had dodged the tricky issue of choice. So, while government was promoting choice of 'energy efficient' fridges, as consumers, we start to expect larger ones and it becomes normal to own two. Then along come the promotions for ice-makers and beerchillers. The same was true for fuel efficiency in cars. On average, cars have become more energy-efficient, but we use them more. Carbon emissions from road transport are now nine per cent higher than 15 years ago.
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