The Age of Choice Quotes

“The subject of this book, in the end, is human actors’ evolving choices about choices: what should be subject to choice, how should choosing happen, who should be able to do it, what should it mean.”
― Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life

“We blame the poor, in particular, for their bad choices as individuals, or even for the choice of poverty itself, rather than recognize the ways in which opportunities to choose and the choices themselves, starting with the menu of options, are constantly and everywhere inequitably defined by race, gender, location, education level, social expectations, age, and especially wealth.”
― Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life

“At a minimum, goes one strain of critique, we have become so preoccupied with needing to choose so much and so often, from teakettles and vacuums onward, that we no longer have much residual appetite for collective decision making or, indeed, for investment in community affairs.”
― Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life

“More information doesn’t always help either. That is because we also tend to ignore facts that do not jibe with the outcome we desire, focus on the wrong information, or see patterns where they do not exist.”
― Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life

“Several decades of research by psychologists, behavioral economists, and now neuroscientists have helped us see that even fully adult men and women are not as good at making choices as we have long tended to think they are.”
― Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life

“One of Hannah Arendt’s great insights for historians was, to my mind, that political norms always depend on historically specific but socially widespread mental habits.32 A liberal order, for example, needs distinctive ways of thinking, judging, seeking truth, and more, both for its creation and for its reinforcement.”
― Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life