This book originated in a sense of frustration at the absurd proliferation of choices which offer little genuine diversity in consumer markets. My frustration increased as choice was touted as the answer to a variety of policy issues, to which it seemed more a diversion to avoid the issues than a constructive response to them. My perspective was sharpened by reading Barry Schwartz’s The paradox of choice. Here, I recognised, was a useful input on the problems of choice, but it did not go far enough. Schwartz offers a helpful but mainly psychological assessment of how we experience choice, but does not give full consideration to the social context. This book grew as an attempt to explore matters further.

I am grateful to a number of people for sustaining my conviction that it was a project worth pursuing: to my two elder children Imogen and Cedric for subjecting the draft to the eye of a younger generation; to my friend and colleague Liz Kingdom for a characteristically meticulous review; to Karen Bowler of The Policy Press for, as she put it, being ‘optimistic about this one’, and engaging with the text in more detail than most editors will do; and to my partner Liz for bearing with my periods of gloom and insisting that there was something worth pursuing. For the limitations of the text which follows, I of course bear full responsibility.

Michael Clarke