Scarcity

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Hardcover – September 3, 2013

Author: Visit Amazon's Sendhil Mullainathan Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0805092641 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much – September 3, 2013
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• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Times Books (September 3, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805092641
• ISBN-13: 978-0805092646
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,064 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Applied Psychology
  • #22 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Applied Psychology
  • #24 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Social Psychology & Interactions

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 this book, written with his long-time collaborator, Eldar Shafir, who's a Princeton psychologist.

Still this book was a bit of a disappointment, possibly because I expected so much. A lot of the conclusions are, well, obvious. The book's entire thesis can be summarized as: "People make bad decisions when they are resource-constrained, whether the resources in question are money, time, food, or something else." Some of it recaps what has been said before about hyperbolic discounting in economics.

The book's chapters go like this...

Intro - definition of "scarcity" and overview of its consequences
Chap. 1 - The good: scarcity can cause focus. The bad: focus can mean inattention to other things.
Chap. 2 - Scarcity causes an internal disruption that makes it harder to make good decisions.
Chap. 3 - Slack (the opposite of scarcity) allows better choices and reduces the bad consequences of failiure.
Chap. 4 - Poor people are sometimes more realistic about estimating costs, because they have to be.
Chap. 5 - Borrowing when you're short of cash leads to a descending spiral of debt.
Chap. 6 & 7 - Poverty is a vicious circle of scarcity leading to bad decisions leading to scarcity...
Chap. 8 - Poverty can be alleviated by creating slack, such as extra cash or day care to create more time.
Chap. 9 - Efficient use of resources and division of labor helps organizations become more efficient.
Chap.

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