Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir

The poor, the busy, and the lonely all share something surprising in common: scarcity itself narrows the mind's focus, leaving less mental bandwidth for good decisions, regardless of individual character.

A behavioral economics exploration of how having too little of anything — money, time, or even social connection — captures the mind and consumes cognitive bandwidth, leading to poor decisions that have less to do with character and more to do with the psychology of scarcity itself.