Even the good news is presented as bad news. Reactionaries and radicals agree that ‘excessive choice’ is an acute and present danger – that it is corrupting, corroding and confusing to encounter ten thousand products in the supermarket, each reminding you of your limited budget and of the impossibility of ever satisfying your demands. Consumers are ‘overwhelmed with relatively trivial choices’ says a professor of psychology. This notion dates from Herbert Marcuse, who turned Marx’s notion of the ‘immiseration of the proletariat’ by steadily declining living standards on its head and argued
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