For somebody for whom they’re going to buy a certain amount of gas irrespective of the price, should they really spend so much time thinking about the price of gas? It doesn’t affect anything they do. – Sendhil Mullainathan
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. – Sendhil Mullainathan
As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you’re very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in. – Sendhil Mullainathan
Our soft hearts are what tell us that, whatever the circumstances of birth, everyone must be given opportunities to do well. – Sendhil Mullainathan
Our outrage at inequality is primal. But primal emotions are not always noble ones. Of course, when I see a colleague receive some award, I covet it. But this is not me at my best, and these are not the feelings we would instill and promote in our children. – Sendhil Mullainathan
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.’ – Sendhil Mullainathan
It’s 2014, and women are still paid less than men. Does this suggest that a gender pay gap is an unfortunately permanent fixture? Will it still be with us in 50 years? I would predict yes. But by that point, it will be men who will be earning less than women. – Sendhil Mullainathan
One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn’t do is really focus on the fact that ‘I want this person to like me.’ That’s going to make you very uninteresting. But the lonely, they just can’t help but focus on that. – Sendhil Mullainathan
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. – Sendhil Mullainathan
You can get pictures into what people are sort of thinking about others. Just go onto Google and type ‘Why are Indians’ and then look for the autocomplete. – Sendhil Mullainathan
The ability to save automatically is among the most powerful tools available to us. – Sendhil Mullainathan
Time can be dissected easily: an hour can be cut up in many ways. Fifteen minutes on this memo, a five-minute walk to another meeting, 30 minutes at that meeting and then 10 minutes debriefing. Oh, and maybe a quick phone call on the walk to that meeting. The busy are expert at dissection: that’s how they make it all fit. – Sendhil Mullainathan
Things that price at $4.99 sell very differently than things that price at $5. – Sendhil Mullainathan
Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, ‘This is a good ad campaign.’ So, there is a little bit of slippage there. That’s just a caveat. That’s different from actually having an effective ad campaign. – Sendhil Mullainathan
I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent. – Sendhil Mullainathan
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. – Sendhil Mullainathan
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? – Sendhil Mullainathan
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. – Sendhil Mullainathan
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. – Sendhil Mullainathan
We should try to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to find a great life. It’s a quest that will require political will and ingenious policies. President Obama’s proposed expansion of the earned-income tax credit goes in this direction, but we need more. – Sendhil Mullainathan
The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you’ll have little in the future. – Sendhil Mullainathan
The amount of resources we put in are disparate. We put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies. How much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible, systematic, testing way? – Sendhil Mullainathan
It’s hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread. – Sendhil Mullainathan
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. – Sendhil Mullainathan
No one would say, ‘Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.’ We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? ‘Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let’s put it out there.’ – Sendhil Mullainathan
Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is ‘scarcity,’ and anyone who has the experience of ‘having very little’ experiences the same psychology. – Sendhil Mullainathan
