Scarcity: A Few Thoughts While Reading

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

Having bought Scarcity several weeks ago, I have finally begun reading, and while I anticipate using this work in my scholarship and blogging once I have finished, I feel compelled to offer some evolving thoughts as I read.

My interest in the book is grounded in my own work on the relationship between poverty/affluence and education, particularly in terms of how public and political perceptions of poverty/affluence impact public/political discourse and ultimately policy.

Thus, a few thoughts while reading:

• Mullainathan and Shafir offer a compelling and readable Introduction. I trust the scholarship of the work, and appreciate that it begins as an engaging narrative.
• “By scarcity, we mean having less than you feel you need” (p. 4). Here is a important point, I believe, related to the cultural assumptions about people living in poverty. In the U.S., poverty is associated with individual choices and weaknesses, ignoring, I think, the more powerful impact of social norms. In a consumer culture that shows citizens that their self-worth is directly related to the possessions, people living in poverty are profoundly impacted by “having less than you feel you need.” That sense, then, directly drives the behavior of people living in poverty. The privileged in the U.S. typically discount people living in poverty as lazy and/or careless based on people in poverty owning flat-screen TVs, iPhones, or new cars. I anticipate this book contributing powerfully to that misguided and hypocritical way of thinking about poverty and people in poverty.
• “Scarcity captures the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it….Scarcity is more than just the displeasure of having very little. It changes how we think. It imposes itself on our minds” (p. 7). The consequences of thoughts and actions driven by scarcity, then, are important for understanding poverty. As Mullainathan and Shafir explain later, “So when the hungry recognize CAKE [in an experiment detailed in the Introduction] more quickly, it is not because they choose to focus more on this word. It happens faster than they could choose to do anything. This is why we use the word capture when describing how scarcity focuses the mind” (pp. 8-9). This discussion reminds me of Gladwell’s arguments posed in Blink related to racism (with the caveat that Gladwell poses some real problems related to his allegiances and work).
• “But we suggest that while physical scarcity is ubiquitous, the feeling of scarcity is not” (p. 11). Attitudes about poverty in the U.S. tend to refuse to acknowledge the power of relative wealth—how the culture imposes views of poverty/affluence onto people. To pretend poverty and behavior related to poverty are somehow not socially constructed is at the center of why and how U.S. attitudes about poverty are deforming (see Freire).
• “Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth [We can directly measure mental capacity or, as we call it, bandwidth] as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth” (p. 13). This directly calls into question “no excuses” policies that suggest schools alone can overcome the impact of poverty.
• “There is one particularly important consequence [of scarcity]: it further perpetuates scarcity….Scarcity creates its own traps” (p. 14). The so-called cycle of poverty may be a cycle of scarcity—beyond the power of individuals to create or change. According to Mullainathan and Shafir, “Scarcity forces all choices. Abstractions become concrete” (p. 20).
• “In the real world, the poor and rich differ in so many ways” (p. 26).
• “Focusing on on thing means neglecting other things….Instead of saying that scarcity ‘focuses,’ we could just as easily say that scarcity causes us to tunnel: to focus single-mindedly on managing the scarcity at hand….Tunneling is not [a positive]: scarcity leads us to tunnel and neglect other, possibly more important, things” (p. 29). There is a luxury of time and focus found in affluence, but not in poverty. The rules of life change within both affluence and poverty. To judge behavior of the impoverished by the rules of the affluent, then, is a fatal flaw of understanding poverty.