No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart
The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice
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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Praise
Conservatives dress up their destructive policy prescriptions in the language of “individual choice.” Tom Slee’s paradigm-busting book shows there are other, better ways for society to make choices. Marvelous, and timely.
– - Jim Stanford, economist, Canadian Auto Workers
Contents
| List of Figures | |
| Acknowledgements | |
| Chapter 1 | A World of Choice |
| Chapter 2 | Good Choices and Bad Outcomes |
| Chapter 3 | Private Choices and Public Failures |
| Chapter 4 | Arms Races and Red Queens |
| Chapter 5 | Co-operation and Its Limits |
| Chapter 6 | Divide and Conquer |
| Chapter 7 | That Obscure Object of Desire |
| Chapter 8 | Join or Get Run Over |
| Chapter 9 | The Devil You Know |
| Chapter 10 | Free to Choose, but Exploited |
| Chapter 11 | Beyond Whimsley |
| Notes | |
| Bibliography | |
| Index |
