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A surprising and intriguing examination of how scarcity—and our flawed responses to it—shapes our lives, our society, and our culture Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do organizations get stuck firefighting? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that they are all examples of a mindset produced by scarcity. Drawing on cuttingedge research from behavioral science and economics, Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, why students and busy executives mismanage their time, and why sugarcane farmers are smarter after harvest than before. Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus. Mullainathan and Shafir discuss how scarcity affects our daily lives, recounting anecdotes of their own foibles and making surprising connections that bring this research alive. Their book provides a new way of understanding why the poor stay poor and the busy stay busy, and it reveals not only how scarcity leads us astray but also how individuals and organizations can better manage scarcity for greater satisfaction and success.
[...]... bandwidth There is one particularly important consequence: it further perpetuates scarcity It was not a coincidence that Sendhil and Shawn fell into a trap and stayed there Scarcity creates its own trap This provides a very different explanation for why the poor stay poor, why the busy stay busy, why the lonely stay lonely, and why diets often fail To understand these problems, existing theories turn to... many of these problems can be understood through the mindset of scarcity This is not to say that culture, economic forces, and personality do not matter They surely do But scarcity has its own logic, one that operates on top of these other forces Analyzing these scarcity traps together does not imply that all forms of scarcity have consequences of the same magnitude The scarcity mindset can operate with... already less focused and less careful than the poor This matches our prediction Having fewer blueberries, the blueberry poor enjoyed a focus dividend In a way it is surprising that blueberry scarcity had effects similar to those observed with deadlines —time scarcity Having few blueberries in a video game bears little resemblance to having only a few minutes left in a meeting or only a few hours to finish... distinguishes between them: their blueberry scarcity By creating scarcity in the lab in this way, we can untangle scarcity from the knots that usually surround it We know that scarcity itself must be the reason The focus dividend—heightened productivity when facing a deadline or the accuracy advantage of the blueberry poor—comes from our core mechanism: scarcity captures the mind The word capture here... our minds when we feel we have too little, and how does that shape our choices and our behaviors? As a blunt approximation, most disciplines, including economics, say the same thing about this question The consequence of having less than we want is simple: we are unhappy The poorer we are, the fewer nice things we can afford—be it a house in a good school district or as little as salt and sugar to flavor... calories we can afford, the fewer foods we can savor And so on Having less is unpleasant And it can have repercussions, for example, on health, safety, or education Scarcity leads to dissatisfaction and struggle While certainly true, we think this misses something critical Scarcity is not just a physical constraint It is also a mindset When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think— whether... and when to release bears little resemblance to the complex choices that determine conversation and pace at work We had stripped the world of all its complexity, all except for scarcity, and yet the same behavior emerged These initial blueberry results illustrate how— whatever else may happen in the world scarcity by itself can create a focus dividend The observed effects of scarcity in controlled conditions... pieces they could sell Not quite what the paleontologists were hoping for Our approach to scarcity is different In economics, scarcity is ubiquitous All of us have a limited amount of money; even the richest people cannot buy everything But we suggest that while physical scarcity is ubiquitous, the feeling of scarcity is not Imagine a day at work where your calendar is sprinkled with a few meetings... even if they had, they would not have been able to do much about it It is very hard to fake scarcity The scarcity dividend happens because scarcity imposes itself on us, capturing our attention against all else We saw that this happened in a way that is beyond conscious control—happening in milliseconds It is why an impending deadline lets us avoid distractions and temptations so readily—it actively... does These data show how scarcity captures attention at many time scales We saw in the introduction that scarcity captures attention at the level of milliseconds—the time it took the hungry to recognize the word CAKE We see it at the scale of minutes (aiming blueberries) and of days and weeks (college seniors getting the most out of their time before graduation) The pull of scarcity, which begins at .