Sendhil Mullainathan > Quotes

“Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes. —JACK HANDEY, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE WRITER”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“As Voltaire noted long ago, “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why having too little means so much

“Abundance means freedom from trade-offs.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“The poor stay poor, the lonely stay lonely, the busy stay busy, and diets fail. Scarcity creates a mindset that perpetuates scarcity.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“When scarcity captures the mind, we become more attentive and efficient.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Scarcity is not just a physical constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think—whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, or days and weeks. By staying top of mind, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave. When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage, and deal with problems differently.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“One broad theme emerges from decades of this research: the poor are worse parents. They are harsher with their kids, they are less consistent, more disconnected, and thus appear less loving. They are more likely to take out their own anger on the child; one day they will admonish the child for one thing and the next day they will admonish her for the opposite;”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“We pinch pennies on small items, yet we blow dollars on big ones. Our frugality is thereby largely wasted. We spend hours surfing the web to save $50 on a $150 pair of shoes. Yet we forgo a few hours’ search to save a couple of hundred dollars on a $20,000 car. These findings are important because they demonstrate how people routinely violate economists’ standard “rational” models of human behavior.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“The challenges of sticking to a plan, the inability to resist a new leather jacket or a new project, the forgetfulness (the car registration, making a phone call, paying a bill) and the cognitive slips (the misestimated bank account balance, the mishandled invitation) all happen because of a shortage of 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.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“The present presses automatically on you. The future does not. To attend to the future requires bandwidth, which scarcity taxes. When scarcity taxes our bandwidth, we become even more focused on the here and now. We need cognitive resources to gauge future needs, and we need executive control to resist present temptations. As it taxes our bandwidth, scarcity focuses on the present, and leads us to borrow.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“The poor have their own planes in the air. They are juggling rent, loans, late bills, and counting days till the next paycheck. Their bandwidth is used up in managing scarcity.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Scarcity in one walk of life means we have less attention, less mind, in the rest of life.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Many systems require slack in order to work well. Old reel-to-reel tape recorders needed an extra bit of tape fed into the mechanism to ensure that the tape wouldn’t rip. Your coffee grinder won’t grind if you overstuff it. Roadways operate best below 70 percent capacity; traffic jams are caused by lack of slack. In principle, if a road is 85 percent full and everybody goes at the same speed, all cars can easily fit with some room between them. But if one driver speeds up just a bit and then needs to brake, those behind her must brake as well. Now they’ve slowed down too much, and, as it turns out, it’s easier to reduce a car’s speed than to increase it again. This small shock—someone lightly deviating from the right speed and then touching her brakes—has caused the traffic to slow substantially. A few more shocks, and traffic grinds to a halt. At 85 percent there is enough road but not enough slack to absorb the small shocks.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“One reason for this is the bandwidth tax. The present presses automatically on you. The future does not. To attend to the future requires bandwidth, which scarcity taxes. When scarcity taxes our bandwidth, we become even more focused on the here and now. We need cognitive resources to gauge future needs, and we need executive control to resist present temptations. As it taxes our bandwidth, scarcity focuses us on the present, and leads us to borrow.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“When scarcity captures the mind, we become more attentive and efficient. There”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why having too little means so much

“Scarcity of any kind, not just time, should yield a focus dividend.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Diets prove difficult precisely because they focus us on that which we are trying to avoid.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“HOBBES: Do you have an idea for your story yet? CALVIN: You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. HOBBES: What mood would that be? CALVIN: Last-minute panic. —CALVIN AND HOBBES BY BILL WATTERSON”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“We fail to build slack because we focus on what must be done now and do not think enough about all the things that can arise in the future. The present is imminently clear whereas future contingences are less pressing and harder to imagine. When the intangible future comes face to face with the palpable present, slack feels like a luxury.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Bandwidth measures our computational capacity, our ability to pay attention, to make good decisions, to stick with our plans, and to resist temptations.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“What this tells us is that expertise, a deeper understanding of the units, can alter perception. Musicians”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why having too little means so much

“There is already a science of scarcity. You might have heard of it. It’s called economics.” He was right, of course. Economics is the study of how we use our limited means to achieve our unlimited desires; how people and societies manage physical scarcity”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Here we see that slack provides a hidden efficiency. It gives us room to maneuver, to reshuffle when we err. Slack gives us room to fail.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Why do we borrow when we face situations of scarcity? We borrow because we tunnel. And when we borrow, we dig ourselves deeper in the future. Scarcity today creates more scarcity tomorrow.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Self-control remains one of the more difficult parts of the study of psychology. We know many ingredients go into the manufacturing of self-control. It depends on how we weigh the future. And we appear to do it inconsistently. Immediate rewards (a marshmallow now) are salient and receive a heavy weight. Rewards in the distant future (two marshmallows later) are less salient and thus receive lower weight. So when we think about one versus two marshmallows in the abstract future, two is better than one. But when one marshmallow is right in front of us now, it suddenly beats two.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Here was an expert who had spent years perfecting her craft, yet one of her best dishes was created under intense pressure, in a couple of hours.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“The scarcity mindset, in contrast, is a contextual outcome, more open to remedies. Rather than a personal trait, it is the outcome of environmental conditions brought on by scarcity itself, conditions that can often be managed. The more we understand the dynamics of how scarcity works upon the human mind, the more likely we can find ways to avoid or at least alleviate the scarcity trap.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“scarcity. It says that periods of scarcity can elicit behaviors that end up pulling us into a scarcity trap. And with scarcity traps, what would otherwise be periods of abundance punctuated by moments of scarcity can quickly become perpetual scarcity.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Scarcity captures the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much