Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan
Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan
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Scarcity
Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Author: Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir

Narrator: Robert Petkoff

Unabridged: 8 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/03/2013


Synopsis

In the blockbuster tradition of Freakonomics, a Harvard economist and a Princeton psychology professor team up to offer a surprising and empowering new way to look at everyday life, presenting a paradigm-challenging 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 are examples of a mindset produced by scarcity.

Drawing on cutting-edge 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.

About Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard University, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About Eldar Shafir

Eldar Shafir is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He conducts research in cognitive science, judgment and decision-making, and behavioral economics. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Richard on March 16, 2022

Addendum, March 2022: An excellent short version of this book is at The Science of Scarcity: A behavioral economist’s fresh perspectives on poverty at the Harvard Alumni magazine. Thanks to Jeff for recommending it.                       ⁜ Are the poor to blame for their poverty? For their flawed......more

Goodreads review by Kristof on September 13, 2013

I once heard Sendhil Mullainathan speak at an event in DC, and he was smart and engaging. He's a MacArthur Foundation genius, a Harvard economist, and a TED speaker. He has a wry sense of humor and tells anecdotes from his personal life to make his economics work come alive. And all of that is in th......more

Goodreads review by Leland on July 14, 2013

The mathematics of queuing theory demonstrates that as resource utilization approaches 100%, queue length and delay increase toward infinity. Systems that are not resilient to congestion reach a point of overload where they experience a decrease in carried load even as offered load increases. We exp......more

Goodreads review by Avi on October 13, 2013

While I find the topic very interesting and the science and research put into understanding the scarcity factor intriguing, I think the book was overly long, repetitive and quite frankly circular. Many of the points and ideas made were well described early in the book and yet 70% of it was just regu......more

Goodreads review by Brian on September 17, 2014

There is no scarcity of books about the brain and psychology and emotion. In fact, the shelves are groaning with them. But here's a psychological take on what you might regard as a problem of economics - and that makes it genuinely fascinating. So it's a shame that it doesn't work better as a book -......more