anything on income inequality. they have said a lot about income inequality as income inequality has gotten worse under obama. i m more in charles position on this. i think that this is a momentary and surprising amateurish messup by these guys as they rolled out their book. it reveals a larger problem. hillary clinton is utterly ironic figure in american life today. what i mean by that is, it doesn t matter what she says, the first thing that goes through people s minds is i wonder what her motivation is for saying that. she could say these pretzels are making me thirsty and people would say gosh, i wonder who she is reaching out to in iowa for saying that. seinfeld reference. of course it s a seinfeld reference. some of these things are subrosa. people, she has this everybody about her is calculating. and i think everybody about her husband was calculating, too. the difference is, is that bill clinton was a really gifted organic politician and hillary clinton isn t. hillary cl
choice seems to be you know, it s as american as apple pie, with or without ice cream, so you get the choice. everything about american life today is about choice. think about during the cold war we were always so proud of the fact that when russians would come to america and they would look at a supermarket, they could buy 55 different kinds of cereal, which is now probably up to 200 or something like that. i got interested in the question of choice a long time ago. there was a fancy upscale grocery store that i used to go to when i was a ph.d. student at stanford. i did this very simple experiment. we put out either six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at two very simple things. the first was whether in which case were people more likely to stop and sample some jam? and the second was in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. what we found was that people
every morning so he can focus on decisions that are actually important. choices can exhaust us. i know business leaders who always eat the same tuna salad lunch every day so they don t have to agonize over what to eat. i ve been thinking about the topic so i decided to bring in two academics who study choice. sheena iyengar is the author of the art of choosing. sheena has been blind from a young age but that hasn t stopped her from becoming a top social scientist and expert on this subject. kent greenfield is a professor of law at boston college. he is the author of the myth of choice. so, sheena, let me start with you. what is wrong with choice? choice seems to be you know, it s as american as apple pie, with or without ice cream, so you get the choice. everything about american life today is about choice. think about during the cold war we were always so proud of the fact that when russians would come to america and they would look at a supermarket, they
influential people in the world according to time magazine. for more on who did and didn t make the list, arana joins the panel. apparently we re going to ask you who didn t make the list. there was one person from msnbc on the list. and well deserved. we champion i expect i ll be a shoo-in next year. rana, talk about who made it. anthony kennedy, ted olsen describing him as perhaps the most influential person in american life today. you know, influence for starters let s talk about what influence is because it runs across a variety of fields. we have politicians, economists, people in the arts. it is a big party. and the key thing about influence no matter who it is, we try and look for people that are not ephemeral. in the age of social media, twitter, et cetera, influence is easier than ever to get but harder to keep. definition of ephemeral.