There’s been research in recent years to suggest that “choice” can make you anxious and uncertain and, on occasion, paralyze you into making no choice at all.
The angst seems to be the worst in the consumer markets, where, for instance, you are faced with not only the choice between Colgate and Crest, but among 37 flavors, colors, methodologies and medical miracles within each brand.
One school of thought suggests that while such a vigorous marketplace may theoretically be to your benefit, in practice, it leaves you standing dumbfounded in the grocery store aisle, until your teeth rot and the matter becomes moot.
Of course, “choice” can be toxic at the other extreme, as well. Cohen in an all-you-can-eat buffet is like China in the international energy markets – gobbling up everything that’s not committed to another, unable or unwilling to choose between the Chinese egg roll and the Swedish meatball, when it is so easy to have them both.
To be sure, some choices are easier than others. When the Hartford Business Journal is plopped on your desk, you just rip it open and turn to Cohen, without any nervous anxiety about what you might have missed along the way. You’ve made the right choice and you know it.
The most heart-rending whine about “choice” we hear most years comes from the Connecticut General Assembly, where legislators fall to their knees in front of the television cameras and gasp about the “difficult choices” that must be made.
Some cruel, heartless types suggest that once you fund the snowplow drivers and the state cops and make sure the school roofs don’t leak, the rest of the choices should be pretty easy. People who say that are “conservatives” and should move to Idaho or somewhere.
In fact, legislators are faced with vast “unmet needs” that are explained to them each session in loving detail by armies of social service types. The sea of nonprofits splash up against the hearing room doors, demanding that choices be made, that checks be written, that grants be granted.
Comparison Shopping
In the darker recesses of the for-profit marketplace, “negative advertising” can help the decision-making process. For instance, the Bob’s Discount Furniture store empire in these here parts has long used advertising campaigns suggesting that its competitors are cheating, lying, ugly overchargers who can only be vanquished if you buy from Bob.
The legislature doesn’t have that benefit when trying to choose among non-profit social service groups. The nonprofit types, at least in public, consider it unseemly to actually compete for government dough by suggesting that the other agency down the street is incompetent or less successful or couldn’t pass an audit of their petty cash drawer, yet alone a program audit.
The hunger advocates and the homeless advocates and the gender-justice advocates and the wayward-youth advocates all participate in a warm group hug at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work; they can’t turn around and start trash-talking when they get to the State Capitol and elbow each other out of the way to testify for more money.
The closest we will come this year to a nonprofit bloodbath is in regards to the issue of whether the University of Connecticut gets big bucks to build a new, shiny, expensive hospital to replace the old, less-shiny, expensive current hospital.
Hospitals are funny pieces of work. In Connecticut, all but one of them are nonprofits; they sort of get along, but they are no longer charitable institutions. They are engaged in furious business battles – for patients, doctors, government money, for the best ballpoint pens from the drug company sales representatives.
When the Connecticut Hospital Association has board meetings, the meal is served with plastic knives, to avoid bloodshed that would send some unsuspecting hospital executive to a competitor’s emergency room.
The hospital executives and affiliated government relations types have been swarming all over newspaper editorial boards and legislators, explaining why UConn is a compassionate gift from God — or a greedy, grasping, money-sucking tyrant. This is all done very politely.
It’s not a simple question. But if you want to see some really uncomfortable nonprofit types trying to sound congenial about choice and competition, you can’t do much better than the UConn case.n
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
