Sendhil Mullainathan
Sendhil Mullainathan
Sendhil Mullainathan)is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. He is co-founder of Ideas42, a non-profit organization that uses behavioral science to help solve social problems, and J-PAL, the MIT Poverty...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
CountryUnited States of America
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Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.
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It is safe to say that when people are short on cash, they might be less productive at work, be worse parents, and have less self-control.
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We ought to arrange calendars as we arrange art on our walls and ask: how does this task fit next to the surrounding ones?
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If women's choices - such as taking time off to rear children - make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys' behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?
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Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity.
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Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task - say, solving math problems - men are more willing to enter competitions based on that task. Men also show less risk aversion.
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If you have urgent current expenses to cover, then future priorities like college and retirement fall off your radar because they are simply less pressing. Scarcity of attention prevents us from seeing what's really important. The psychology of scarcity engrosses us in only our present needs.
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If someone who is poor says, 'I may not have much money, but for me, what's really important is to have a good television so my family can enjoy and watch,' we should be a little careful and recognize that just like we all have individual liberty to make the choices we want, that we not judge too much on that.
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There's a popular image of people who don't save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.
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Some struggle with medical issues - like insomnia - that make sleep hard. But for many of us, the quantity and quality of sleep come down to a matter of choice. Still, only a few enterprising economists have looked closely at this, and generally, those have assumed that we choose our hours of sleep optimally.
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People will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it's touted as some big solution.
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People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don't know. We don't know the prices of things. But gasoline, even when you're not buying, it's staring you in the face. Psychologists call this 'salience.'
Things that price at $4.99 sell very differently than things that price at $5.
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A few drugs - such as beta-blockers, statins and glycogen control medications - have proved very effective at managing hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. Most insurance plans charge something for them. Why not make drugs like these free? Not for everyone, but just the groups for whom they are provably effective.