In No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice, Tom Slee looks at how games theory and the theory of freedom of choice underlie most current economic thinking. Slee gives examples of how both liberal and conservative politicians in the English-speaking world hold up freedom of choice as an ideal to strive towards. But, says Slee, freedom of choice has some unrecognized effects, and he offers a wealth of entertaining examples of how freedom of choice in fact do not give us what we want.

In one example at the beginning of the book, Slee shows how the freedom to choose to shop at Wal-Mart is good for consumers at first, but then leads to less happiness for the consumer. Before Wal-Mart opens, a hypothetical person named Jack enjoys shopping at two downtown department stores: Jack gets reasonable selection and price, the variety of shopping at two stores, and the pleasure of a thriving downtown neighborhood that he gets to walk through every day on his way to work.

Then Wal-Mart opens, and now Jack’s life is lots better: now he has three stores to choose from and even better pricing because of the competition from Wal-Mart, even more variety since there are three stores to choose from and Wal-Mart is even bigger than either department store, and he still gets the pleasure of a thriving downtown. Obviously, Jack chooses to shop at Wal-Mart because it improves his life.

Improves his life, that is, until the two downtown department stores close because they can’t compete with Wal-Mart: now Jack has less variety than before Wal-Mart arrived, less variety, and little pleasure in the now-deserted downtown. Even though Jack made rational choices, Slee writes:

In the beginning Jack made a choice that he believed would make him happier, but now he finds that he is less happy…. His tale embodies the frustrating predicaments that many of us face. We have the right to make choices, and we make them sensibly, like Jack did, and yet that is not enough to lead to a happy outcome.

While we might word it a little differently, those of us in the religion business know all about this predicament. In the context of my own religious frame of reference, I might say something like: Tempting as it may be to do so, we can never make choices based simply on our own personal happiness — we always have to consider a bigger picture that includes our convenantal bonds with the wider community, particularly our covenantal bonds with those who are less fortunate than ourselves, and our covenantal bonds with (the highest ideals of humanity)(God) [pick at least one].

Slee’s book goes much deeper than the Wal-Mart example. In one of my favorite passages, Slee refers to the work of Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter:

Heath and Potter go on to make a provocative claim: that many of the supposedly anti-capitalist counterculture movements of the last 40 or 50 years have actually done more to promote capitalism than to oppose it. They argue that many on the “countercultural left” have misunderstood the nature of the consumerism they oppose, believing that consumerism is all about conformity (“little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look the same”) when in fact modern capitalism thrives on selling goods that allow people to distinguish themselves….

Here again, individual choice doesn’t necessarily lead to the end result desired by the individual making the choice. Here again, no surprise to anyone in the religion business, since we have long known that simply being countercultural isn’t enough.

I can’t resist mentioning that “freedom of choice” has become a watchword within my own denomination. The Unitarian Universalist Association has recently been trumpeting “freedom of choice” in the realm of placing ministers in congregations. We’ve gotten rid of the old system where denominational officials would send a short list of ministerial candidates to a congregation searching for a minister, based on a perceived match between ministers’ abilities and congregations’ needs. Now the whole process is open, and congregations can chase down whichever minister they choose, and ministers can apply for whichever congregation they please. Freedom of choice instead of some pseudo-bishop constraining choices. Everybody’s happy, right?

Wrong. Older, more experienced ministers now find that it’s harder to get a position, women are still not getting most of the highest-paid positions (even though they comprise half of all our ministers now), and I’d be willing to bet that ministers who are not white find it very difficult to find positions in the rich white suburbs. In a few years, we could find ourselves with increasing discrimination against women ministers, older ministers, and non-white ministers. Contrast this to what some United Methodist bishops are doing: deliberately placing white ministers in predominantly non-white congregations, and vice versa, in order to promote the religious values of true equality.

No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice could be a very useful book to promote reflection among people of faith who might want a little critical analysis of the seductive pull of “freedom of choice.”

A new category on this blog is “Summer reading,” short critical summaries of what I’m reading this summer. They’re classified under the general heading of “Meditations” because for me reading is an act of meditation. For some people, meditation involves emptying the mind, but for me religion has to include serious thinking. Since ancient times, Christians have done what is called “lectio divina,” or “divine reading,” reading the scriptures as a way of prayer. I’d like to think that “scriptures” can mean more than just the Bible; I’d include the scriptures and basic texts of all the world’s great religions, commentaries on those scripts, works of theology and philosophy, and really any poetry and prose that invites meditation or thinking, or that just calms me down. But if my reading notes bore you too much, you can just skip over them!