Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B00ED5KZA8 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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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.
Books with free ebook downloads available Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 47 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 3, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00ED5KZA8
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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