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It feels like they match anything. Black. Silver. White. Cream. All rendered in gloss and knit. I wasnt sure how the silhouette would look in person when I first saw it in photos from Junya Watanabes Fall/Winter 2024-25 show. But they made my stomach churn in just the right way. I needed them. And so did a lot of other people. The New Balance 1906L launched last year, kicking off a new type of shoe: the sneaker loafer, aka (and please never say this term aloud) the snoafer. With a loafer silhouette, technical fabrics, and bouncy foam outsoles, they represented a new mix of formal wear and street style. Nike, Hoka, and Puma all quickly followed suit with snoafers of their own. While in Madrid, I snagged some by Hispanitas for my wifeonly learning that they were the stores last pair as I checked out. Snoafers did more than redefine what we consider a sneaker since launching last year; they resuscitated loafers more broadly. Karis Munday, an analyst at the fashion trend firm Edited, says loafer sales are up 33% year over year for men and 28% for women this fall, in a surge she doesnt see fizzling out soon. The sneaker-inspired iteration will be a must-have investment, offering a smart-casual solution that serves equally well in a business casual environment as it does for weekend wear, she shares over email, calling the 1906L the blueprint for the industry. But how did New Balance know it could pull this idea off? A loafer is a preppy shoe. New Balance has preppy connotations, says Charlotte Lee, the design manager at New Balance who created the 1906L. Its a Venn diagram . . . where the center is the sneaker loafer. New Balance 1906L [Photo: New Balance] The evolution of streetwear Lee is a trained footwear designer who has been at New Balance for over a decade. Shes obsessed with aesthetics and culture, but says shes always been intimidated by the streetwear side of her profession. I still feel like an outsider, even though I’m obviously, well and truly, an insider, she says. Indeed, once disregarded by the fashion industry, streetweara mash-up of fashion aesthetics stemming from city subcultures like hip-hop and skatehas been on a 20-year ascendancy into mass culture. Now its become part of the lexicon of dress, often dissociated with any cultural origin. In 2023, I was at the Musinsa Empty shop in Seoul when I pulled a ripped, decaled pair of jeans off the rack and mentioned to the shopkeeper that they had a street vibe. You could trace the pants’ visual lineage to punk rock in London (literal street style), or more recently, to Virgil Ablohs Pyrex Vision, which started by screen-printing on deadstock jeans. The manager looked at me blankly, saying, Thats not street. Sneakers are the greatest motif in streetwearand theyve very much become the mass-produced art of our time as sculptures molded for our feet. As I debated with designer Jeff Staple recently, theres no certainty that such a motif will keep its relevance. It seems like a dozen new sneakers fill our feeds each day, and no art movement lasts forever. Impressionism and surrealism both burned out within 20 years. Designing the New Balance 1906L The 1906L is so interesting because it offers a thesis on how sneakers can evolve to stay relevant. It’s a rare project that was able to cut through the noise to redefine the industry. And perhaps it was Lees point of view, as an insider-outsider who is not too beholden to tradition, that was so crucial in manifesting it. “For me, it’s not just looking at streetwear; it’s looking at all facets of culture to be able to try and inform the shoes I’m working on,” Lee says. “[The 1906L] was born from the concept of integration, the juxtaposition between two worlds: the influence of formal dressing within society and culture, and fashion and trend.”As Lee tracked a bit of buzz around loafersspotting them here and there across the luxury market in the early 2020sshe discovered her perfect juxtaposition for sneakers. It was an indulgent project for me, because it was cheeky. And it was a bit like, Can we? Can’t we? Shall we? she recalls. But once the concept was in her brain, she realized the form immediately. This is not a flex, but I literally drew one with CAD [computer-aided-design software], she says, laughing. Truly, her first draft made it to production, minus a few slight adjustments. When she initially presented the design to the team, the response was a rare, simple, unanimous yes. This was 18 months or more before the shoe was actually released. She says, only upon further reflection on the project, that the shoe solidified so smoothly because it just had to be made this way to feel authentically New Balance. The loafer silhouette already spoke for itself. And the rest was about framing that loafer with New Balance performance DNA. It had to be mesh initially . . . like, it had to have that kind of classic silver overlay, the 2000s running aesthetic, she says. That was all I needed to do, because I knew then the rest was all New Balance DNA, like identity, and I kind of squished it in and made sure it fit in the shape and within the boundary of what a loafer is. More probing reveals a touch more thought, however quickly it came together. When I ask why my shoes feel like they match anything in my closet, she notes that was by design. She pulled the blacks, whites, and even the silver in my shoe from New Balances existing line of lifestyle sneakers, like the 1906R. These colors have already been proven for a wide variety of fashion contexts. riginalGrand [Photo: Cole Haan] A trend that wont die Notably, Lee wasnt the first to mash up formal shoes and sneakers. That idea likely belongs to designer Salehe Bembury, who stuck EVA foam on Cole Haan wingtips in 2014 for his riginalGrand, but the concept never quite gelled to reach a larger scale. Lee had a feeling the shoe would be a hit due to its polarizing, disjointed identity. Loafers are among the most versatile formal shoeone that can be dressed up more than a boat shoebut are also easier to doff and don than a New Balance sneaker. I wear them all the time, not because Im being self-indulgent, but because I’m lazy, she says. Like, you just slip your foot in, and off you go. But she was also worried that the shoe was arriving too late, and that loafers would already be over by the time it shipped. It turned out to be the opposite. Were way past launch, and I think it’s still continuing, she says. I think what we’re seeing now is a diversification of integration . . . how can we integrate two worlds that shouldn’t belong, but when they’re in perfect harmony, they do belong? I actually believe its not just about mashing up two unlikely ideas. I think the snoafer has given us one of the first truly convincing theses on how the sneaker can evolve, and how we can reconcile our penchant for foams with wider, more formal visions of self-expression. Knwls Air Max Muse [Photo: Nike] The Knwls Air Max Musea collaboration between Nike and the London fashion house Knwlsfeels like the perfect acceleration of concept. At first glance, you might call it a ballet sneaker, and it is. The ballet sneaker is partly inspired by the ballet flats of dance class, but when you really study where their silhouettes are going on the chunkier end of the outsole equationlike the Muse, youll also see the almost hoofed posture of a Tabi heel, and a smooth shadow of a loafer. Sneex (created by the founder of Spanx), like other head-on attempts at a high-heel sneaker, are pretty cringe. Id argue thats because they werent refined within the established design language and limitations of the sneaker. Meanwhile, the Muse is basically a heel for the sneaker ageright down to its sharply pointed toe boxand Id suggest the Simone Rocha tracker ballet flat verges toward the same idea. Today, were witnessing an evolution of the sneaker itself, born from a culture finally prepared to reconcile its technical materials and motifsnot simply as fodder for athletic performance or fashion trend, but as a tradition of design thats essential to craft and culture alike. Just please dont call it a snoafer.
Category:
E-Commerce
Amazon is well aware that youre spending hours agonizing over the reviews for seven different near-identical toaster ovens before you actually make a decision. Now, it has an AI feature for thatand we have to admit, its pretty helpful. Help me decide is a new AI shopping function that rolled out on October 23 across millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon shopping app and mobile browser. It uses large language models and AI tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of offerings to analyze your shopping history, purchase details, and preferences, and then match those insights with product details and customer reviews to recommend products that you might be most interested in. Designed to cut down on shopper indecision and usher users straight to the checkout cart, the feature is a smart move for Amazon, and it might make holiday shopping a bit less tortuous for customers. As the worlds most popular online retail site continues to roll out new AI features, its serving as a proving ground for how AI is radically reshaping online shopping as we know it. How to use Amazon’s new “Help me decide” feature To try out Help me decide, you can either navigate to the Keep shopping for tab on the Amazon homepage, or just click on a bunch of related products until you see a black pop-up with a sparkle icon. From there, the tool will select the product that it deems best of your recently viewed based on customer reviews, your personal product criteria, and prices and return rates. Its selection includes an AI-generated summary of why you should commit to its choice, highlighting the most relevant product features and including one stand-out review of the item. At the bottom of the screen, you can also toggle to two other suggestions: one budget pick, on the lower end of the price spectrum, and one upgrade pick, if youre inclined to get spendy. “Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after youve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision, Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon, said in a press release. I gave the tool a try after spending the past several days window shopping for cat trees that are definitely outside my budget. True to its description, Help me decide picked a tree in the middle of the price range (still $99.98), describing it as the ultimate choice for your furry friends indoor adventure. The summary went on to describe the trees impressive 70-inch height, spacious hammock, and removable top perch that ensures easy cleaning. Despite the flowery language used in the AI summaries, I found the tool generally helpful and easy to use. How AI is changing online shopping The Help me decide add-on is the latest in a growing bevy of AI shopping features from Amazon. These include the companys AI shopping assistant, Rufus; an Interests feature that tracks personalized shopping categories; and AI-generated review highlights that give top notes on customer reactions to products. Over the past several months, brands including Ralph Lauren and Pinterest have invested in their own AI tools to drive online shopping. Walmart and Sams Club have partnered with OpenAI to allow customers to shop from within the chatbot. And the AI-powered app Daydream is purpose-built to help users find the perfect outfits. In a recent Adobe Analytics study on holiday shopping behaviors, the company shared that 2024 was the first time it noticed a measurable surge in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites before the holidays. Now, its expecting a major escalation of that trend, estimating that holiday AI traffic to retail sites will rise by 520% in 2025. AI is quietly rewiring the way we shopboth in subtle ways, like by improving product recommendations, and in more direct ways, like via AI chatbots that can literally shop on behalf of a user. It won’t be long until every part of the online shopping experience is guided, at least in some way, by a dedicated AI model.
Category:
E-Commerce
In 1995, the kids brand Hanna Andersson debuted matching family pajamas, kick-starting a trend. Three decades later, it’s become a tradition in many families to buy PJs emblazoned with reindeer or Christmas trees or menorahs to wear during the holidays. But if you’re concerned that seasonally specific sleepwear may not be so eco-friendlyafter all, how much use will your toddler get from those Santa Claus jammies?Hanna Andersson has a suggestion for you: Why not buy them secondhand? In 2023, Hanna Andersson launched Hanna-Me-Downs, a website for customers to buy and sell pre-owned products. If you scroll through the site, you’ll find thousands of gently used Hanna Andersson pajamas for the whole family, along with dresses, T-shirts, and trousers from previous seasons. Since the platform debuted, Hanna Andersson has become the top resold children’s brand in the U.S., selling more than 160,000 garments to 25,000 customers. And interest in Hanna-Me-Downs is only growing, with site visits increasing by 30% this year. Aimée Lapic, who became the brand’s CEO in 2022, helped launch Hanna-Me-Downs and believes it has been one reason behind the brand’s growth in recent years. (Since Hanna Andersson is a private company owned by the private equity firm L Catterton, it does not share its revenue, but says it has experienced double-digit growth since 2019, and even higher levels of profitability.) Other factors include its decision, in 2020, to shutter all 65 of its brick-and-mortar stores to become a purely digital direct-to-consumer retailer, and its launch, in 2023, of a rewards program that now has more than a million members. While it might seem counterintuitive for a resale site to accelerate Hanna Andersson’s growthsince it might cannibalize the brand’s sale of new clothingLapic says the opposite is true. While the platform itself does not generate a profit, she believes it has brought new customers to the brand, also reinforcing the message that its products are made to last. “Circularity benefits us from a business perspective,” Lapic says. “It’s a real solid proof point that we sell high-quality, durable clothing.” [Photo: Hanna Andersson] Shopping for Kids in the Era of Fast Fashion Many parents find it hard to shop sustainably for their kids. Children grow out of their clothes quickly and ruin outfits with stains and tears. In the era of fast fashion, budget retailers like Carter’s and Target market children’s clothes that are so inexpensive, parents don’t mind if they only last a few weeks or months before throwing them out. So it might not seem worth it to spend more on durable clothes that are more expensive. Four more than 40 yearsas fast fashion has taken offHanna Andersson has tried to make the case that it is worth spending more on high-quality kids’ clothes. Its dresses start at $50, and T-shirts start at $30. Carter’s sells those products for as low as $15 and $5, respectively. This focus on quality goes all the way back to the brand’s origins. Hanna Andersson was founded by Gun Denhart, a Swede who had settled in Portland, Oregon. She wanted to create clothing that would allow kids to play in the rainy, muddy conditions that were common in the Pacific Northwest. Today, the company continues to focus on quality, thanks to rigorous durability standards. In testing, each garment is washed between 60 and 100 times to ensure the fabric won’t wear out or fade. Over the years, the company has introduced new eco-friendly fabrics such as certified organic cotton, Oeko-Tex fabrics that are certified to be free from harmful chemicals; and its newest material, HannaSoft, which is made of bamboo. In each case, it puts the new materials through durability tests. Hanna Andersson has attracted a wide range of customers, Lapic says. Some are well-heeled parents who shop from other high-end children’s brands, like Petit Bateau or Janie and Jack. But others are middle-class families. “Not all of our customers are wealthy,” she says. “Some just buy fewer clothes than they would otherwise, and others buy secondhand.” For years, consumers have been shopping for used Hanna Andersson clothes on other brands’ secondhand sites. Lapic says that it made sense for the company to create its own platform so it could engage directly with these fans of the brand. “Our clothes were very popular on ThredUp and Poshmark,” Lapic says. “We thought we had an opportunity to keep these buyers and sellers within the Hanna Andersson ecosystem.” [Photo: Hanna Andersson] Resale as a Growth Engine Lapic says that the brand tries to give Hanna-Me-Downs customers good value for their old clothes. When they send in a used product, they can get 70% of the resale value in cash. If they choose to get store credit at the main Hanna Andersson website, they can get 100% of the resale value. Lapic says that 80% of sellers choose the store credit option. And the brand has found that when these customers use their credit to shop from the Hanna Andersson site, they spend two and a half times the amount on the gift card. Besides engaging people who are already big fans of the brand, Lapic says that it has also tapped into an entirely new customer base that has never shopped with Hanna Andersson before. This group is drawn to Hanna-Me-Downs’ lower prices, and 50% will return to the site to stock their kids closets with pre-owned Hanna Andersson clothes. “They end up buying from us multiple times,” she says. Ultimately, Lapic says that Hanna-Me-Downs illustrates that promoting sustainable behavior doesn’t have to come at the cost of profitability. The resale site keeps clothes circulating in the economy for longer, and reinforcesthe message that it is better to buy fewer, better-quality items. “We are excited about how this platform benefits our customers, the planet, and future generations,” Lapic says.
Category:
E-Commerce
The kinds of videos that do well on YouTube Shorts are depressingly predictable: cute cats, heated arguments, crazy stunts, and plenty of good old-fashioned shots of people suffering low-key injuries. The issue is that the real world produces only so many epic fails. And of the small number that do happen, even fewer are caught on video. Think of all the airplane passenger arguments and dropped wedding cakes that have gone untaped and unposted! Enter Sora. OpenAIs new video generator is hyperrealistic, and was clearly trained on billions of hours of short-form, vertical video. That makes it incredibly good at generating the kinds of short, grabby videos that pull in our attention and manipulate our emotions. How do I know? I used Sora to create an entirely fake YouTube channel, populated with AI-generated versions of the kinds of videos I see on YouTube Shorts and TikTok all the time. It took me about 30 minutes to build and it cost nothing. In less than a week, I have 21,400 views and counting. Lets dig in. Slop by the bucketful Getting access to OpenAIs Sora social network is hard. The platform launched as an invite-only app, and despite this hurdle quickly ballooned to more than 5 million active users. Its growing even faster than ChatGPT. Once youre into Sora, though, using Sora 2 (the actual video generation model behind it) is extremely easy. You just type in the concept for a video, and Sora 2 writes the script, generates about 11 seconds of very realistic vertical video, and even adds synchronized audio. The app struggles with beautiful, cinematic footage. In my early testing, Googles rival Veo 3.1which the tech behemoth launched to compete with Sora 2is much better at that. But where Sora 2 succeeds is in generating emotionally charged, short-form vertical videos. The model was likely built to drive the Sora social video network, and it shows. I decided to test the appeal of Sora 2s videos by moving them over to a traditional short-form video platform so they could compete in the real world against actual grabby, vertical clips. To that end, I opened up Sora 2 and started typing in ideas for emotionally heated videos at random. I quickly found that Sora 2 can work with either very detailed or very vague ideas. For one video, I used ChatGPT to write a detailed script for a complex scenario: a woman making a phone call in order to reconnect with her estranged mother. Sora 2s video nailed the task. From the subtle jump cuts to the swelling music (again, entirely AI-generated), its 11 seconds of surprisingly powerful micro-cinema. For other videos, I went much simpler, letting Sora 2 run with my basic prompt. The text two roommates have an argument, cellphone video yielded this: Entering A man mistakenly knocks over a giant, beautiful wedding cake and people are shocked, realistic cellphone video produced this gem, which is my favorite Sora video so far: In total, I created eight videos. Each one took about 60 seconds to generate. Using Sora 2 within the Sora app is currently free. Basically, the system generates AI slop by the bucketful. Your job is simply to give the model direction and scoop up its output. Cat fail arbitrage You can post your AI slop directly to Sora itself. But I wasnt content to stop there. Instead, I wanted to see how these videos would do in the real world. So I went over to YouTube and started uploading them to the platforms YouTube Shorts sectionbasically YouTubes clone of TikTok. Rather than starting a channel entirely from scratch, I used a neglected one where I had previously posted videos of my dog, Lance. It had no traffic to speak of, and only a handful of videos, mostly uploaded to share with friends and family members. The channel felt like an ideal blank slate; it wasnt entirely newI was worried that YouTube might flag and delete a fully new channel that started posting AI content right out of the gatebut hadnt been developed at all. I could thus test what would happen if an existing YouTuber suddenly started posting nothing but Soras delightful slop. I uploaded each of my new videos. Crucially, I didnt want to deceive anyone, so I left Soras prominent watermarks in place. I also fully disclosed that the videos are AI generated, using YouTubes Altered Content flag. It doesnt seem to have mattered. As I write this about a week later, my videos have already received 21,400 views. Poor little Lances best video had gotten only 2,600 views in the three years since I posted it. My top video from Sorathe one of the wedding cake fallingis at 12,000 views and counting. Containment is impossible AI-generated videos wouldnt be so much of a threat to the traditional social media landscape if they staye put. You could go to Sora for AI-generated fails, and TikTok or YouTube Shorts for the authentic ones. My experiment proves that this containment is unrealistic. Its shockingly easy to move videos from Sora to other vertical video platforms. And despite disclosures and watermarks, users seem to engage with the AI videos just as much as they would with real ones. Sora the social network is also a pared-down experience when it comes to running the Sora 2 model. In its new API, OpenAI provides developers with direct access to Sora 2, including customizable video lengths and aspect ratios. Videos generated through the API cost $0.10 per second. They have no distinguishable watermarks. It took me only about 20 minutes to code up an integration in Python, and I was creating fully automated AI slop for about $1 per video, at scale. All thats to say: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are about to be inundated with an unstoppable deluge of this stuff. YouTube tacitly admitted that when it introduced its Altered Content flag over a year ago. At the time, AI video was so janky and unusable that YouTubers were confused as to why anyone would need to disclose AI contents origins. Now we know. For consumers, the message is clear. From here on out, trust nothing that you see on vertical video apps. That amazing bottle flip or delightfully juicy neighbor fight clip may well have emerged not from real life, but from the endless slop bucket of Sora 2.
Category:
E-Commerce
Below, co-authors Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei share five key insights from their new book, Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making. Barry spent 45 years teaching psychology at Swarthmore College. Now he holds a visiting position at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. Richard held a similarly long tenure at Swarthmore College, 42 years, as a philosophy professor. Whats the big idea? There is no such thing as a calculator for lifes decisions. Try as we might to quantify, count, and calculate in search of the right choice, that is simply not how wise decision-making happens. Qualitative judgment and consideration of preferences and values are required when identifying the best option before us. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Barrybelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Sorting through the possibilities Imagine waking up on a beautiful Saturday morning and asking yourself, What should I do today? You consider the possibilities: get some exercise, go for a hike, go to a lovely park with a serious book under your arm, catch up on work, veg out, and watch sports on television. Or maybe, instead of thinking about what you might do, think about what we might do. What social activities might you engage in? Get in touch with friends, visit your mother at the assisted living facility, or help your adult daughter pack for her apartment move. Lots of possibilities. Is there a right way to think through your options for the day? Is there a right way to choose which of these things to do? 2. Rational choice theory In economics, according to rational choice theory, there is a rational way to make decisions, which requires thinking about two things: How valuable are the options youre deciding between? How likely is it that the option you pick will be as good as you expect? We live in an uncertain world, and so you assess the value and probability of your options, then multiply them. What you get is expected utility. The rational choice should be the option that provides the greatest amount of expected utility. This framework analogizes the decisions we make in life to the decisions you might make in a gambling casino. Whats the best strategy in a blackjack hand? What are the odds and payoffs at the roulette table? In situations like this, it only matters how much you could possibly win and how likely you are to win. Rational choice theory suggests that we should think about most of our decisions in these terms. In figuring out how good it will be if I choose this option, and how likely it is to be that good, you must quantify the relevant information. Create a spreadsheet of all the factors that might matter in making a choice. List how good a particular option is with respect to all these factors, and enter a value for both how good it is and how probable it is. Fill out the spreadsheet with all the options, push a button that does the math, and youve made a rational decision. This framework analogizes the decisions we make in life to the decisions you might make in a gambling casino. Rational decisions are quantitative. You need to attach quantities and magnitudes to both the value of the options and the likelihood that you will achieve that value. Rational choice theory has nothing to tell us about what your preferences among options should be, what your values should be, or what set of options you should consider. In this economic framework, you have whatever values you have, your options are whatever options the world presents, you create the spreadsheet, do the math, and pick the best option. Thats the model of rational decision making. 3. Framing the options Do we behave as rational decision makers? Definitely not. About 50 years ago, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started studying how people make decisions. They did some beautiful and extremely important research, but unfortunately, Tversky died prematurely. Kahneman survived to win the Nobel Prize in Economics and published a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, which has been on the bestseller lists for almost 10 years. His work helped create the field of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics research has illustrated the ways in which people fail to meet the standards of rational choice theory. People are bad at thinking about probability. People are heavily influenced by the way in which options are framed. People divide their decisions into different accounts and often dont aggregate the potential consequences of those decisions into one big account. People are highly influenced by anchors. A $500 suit seems inexpensive on a rack full of $1000 suits but seems quite expensive on a rack of $200 suits. These aspects of decision-making get us to more or less the right place, but they can also lead us seriously astray. The way Kahneman came to regard human decision making is that there are two processes happening: Conscious process: Thinking through the pluses and minuses of various options when asking yourself what choice to make. This is effortful, slow, and demanding. Automatic process: This system delivers answers to you even before you frame the question. It is fast, efficient, and operating whether you want it to or not. These two systems interact, and sometimes the automatic system leads the more deliberate, rational system astray. Even if we end up making rational decisions, its not through the processes that rational choice theory tells us we should follow. 4. Not everything canor shouldbe calculated Rational choice theory is a terrible model of what it means to be a rational decision maker. Are most of our decisions really like casino gambles? Can everything that matters in a decision be quantified? Whats good about doing strenuous exercise on a hike? And whats good about helping your daughter pack? What is the common scale of value? Can everything that matters in a decision be quantified? If youre choosing a job, you might be interested in knowing the salary, benefits, who your colleagues will be, whether the work will be interesting, the location, opportunities for advancement, and other relevant details. Its preposterous to attach numbers to all those factors and then use those numbers in a spreadsheet to figure out which job is best for you. Similarly, if youre deciding where to go to college, you might be interested in quantifiable things like graduation rate and average salary after graduation, but what about the qualitative features of the education, social life, food, and housing? Can thes things be arrayed on a spreadsheet using a common scale for assigning value? When you follow rational choice theory, instead of thinking about decisions, you count. Calculation substitutes judgment. In some areas of life, that could be a good thing, but in many others, shutting down your ability to subjectively reflect will lead to worse, impoverished, pinched decisions. 5. A rational decision requires rational judgment Rational choice theory is dangerous as a normative standard. It narrows our thinking by encouraging us to invent quantifications of things that cant be quantified. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government was facing pushback from citizens and wondering how to generate popular support for the war. It was concluded that if the public saw that the U.S. was winning, then more people would favor involvement. But it was a guerrilla war, so can someone know whos winning? It was decided to use body counts and casualties as an indicator. If the enemy had higher numbers of wounded or dead than our side, then we must be winning. This affected our fighting strategy. Instead of seeking strategic advantages, we made decisions designed to maximize casualties because it meant we could tell folks back home that the U.S. was winning the war. As a result, we didnt win the war, and thousands of people died needlessly. Rational deciding requires rational judgment and not just counting. You can see the danger of rational choice theory decisions, like where to go to college, too. People are heavily influenced by the ratings of U.S. News & World Report, so universities have learned how to game those ratings by making themselves look good with respect to the dimensions that U.S. News cares about. Does that make them better institutions? Maybe sometimes, but mostly it does not. Rational choice theory forces us to focus on things that can be easily compared and quantified while leaving out the rest. Rational deciding requires rational judgment and not just counting. We dont want our ability to think and judge rationally to atrophy because we think that the rational approach to decisions is essentially mechanical and algorithmic. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
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