Sendhil Mullainathan

Scarcity

1. IDEA 1

   Scarcity captures the mind

   Mullainathan and Shafir argue that having too little, whether money, time or food, changes how people think. Scarcity grabs attention and focuses the mind on the urgent shortage, often at the expense of everything else.

2. IDEA 2

   Tunnelling narrows our focus

   The authors call this focus tunnelling: concentrating on immediate needs and neglecting other important things. A busy person rushing to a deadline, for example, may forget health or relationships. Important but non-urgent matters slip out of view.

3. IDEA 3

   Scarcity taxes mental bandwidth

   Scarcity takes up mental space, which the authors call bandwidth. They describe studies suggesting that worrying about money can temporarily lower performance on reasoning tasks, as if people lost sleep.

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