Cat

“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. [...] What should you do? Should you leave spaces open in your schedule...just in case something unexpected comes up...? In effect, yes. That's what you do when you allocate forty minutes to drive somewhere a half hour away...When you face scarcity, slack is a necessity.”
― Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

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

“Now imagine that we offer you a highly subsidized daycare program. What exactly are you getting for it? Surely, we are saving you time shuttling your kids back and forth. We might be saving you money as well...But we would be giving you something else, even more precious. Something you could spend on many things. We would be giving you back all that mental bandwidth that you currently use to fret, worry, and juggle these arrangements. We'd be taking a cognitive load off. As we've seen, this would help your executive control, your self-control more broadly, even your parenting. It would increase your general cognitive capacity, your ability to focus, the quality of your work, or whatever else you chose to turn your mind to. From this perspective, help with child care is much more than that. It is a way to build human capital of the deepest kind: it creates bandwidth.”
― Eldar Shafir, 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