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“Companies are not immune to the psychology of scarcity. For example, during lean times, many firms slash their marketing budgets. Some experts believe that this is not a sound business decision. In fact, it looks a lot like tunneling.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“To make matters worse, we have seen how the constant struggle with poverty (and scarcity generally) further depletes self-control. When you can afford so little, so many more things need to be resisted, and your self-control ends up being run down.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

“Liberal market economies managed to achieve relatively high gender equality, surely inadvertently, by keeping labor markets fluid in ways that did not put women at a disadvantage against men. Class inequality is the greater problem than gender equality in those countries. There are more female managers in those economies than in the more generous welfare states, but income inequality is stark among women as well as among men. It is also true that women tend to cluster in the low-skill jobs at the bottom of the wage dispersion. In the past the family compensated for this inequality to some extent because higher-earning males were more likely to marry lower-earning females. This pattern has now reversed in that economically successful men now are much more likely to marry equally successful women, increasing the inequality in the distribution of family income. This trend is magnified by a higher probability of low-income females ending up as single mothers. The challenge in these countries with short-term job commitments is therefore to improve the life chances of men and women without means, and especially low-income single parent families, by increasing opportunities for skill acquisition and retraining as necessary.”
― Torben Iversen, Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality

“Imagine working on a presentation that you need to deliver at a meeting. In the days leading up to the meeting, you work hard but you vacillate. The ideas may be there, but tough choices need to be made on how to pull it all together. Once the deadline closes in, though, there is no more time for dawdling. Scarcity forces all the choices.”
― Sendhil Mullainathan, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much