Scarcity
内容简介
A surprising and intriguing 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 mind-set 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.
Mullainathan and Shafir discuss how scarcity affects our daily lives, recounting anecdotes of their own foibles and making surprising connections that bring this research alive. Their book provides a new way of understanding why the poor stay poor and the busy stay busy, and it reveals not only how scarcity leads us astray but also how individuals and organizations can better manage scarcity for greater satisfaction and success.
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作者简介
Sendhil Mullainathan is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His real passion is behavioral economics, understanding what makes people tick - whether a senior executive in New York or a farmer in rural Tamil Nadu.
He enjoys having written but is of a mixed mind about writing.
He also occasionally enjoys doing: he helped co-found a non-profit to apply behavioral science (ideas42); and has worked in government.
Much to the surprise of who know him well, he is a recipient of the MacArthur "genius" award.
His hobbies include basketball, googling and fixing-up classic espresso machines. He also enjoys speaking about himself in the third person, which works well for bios but less well in daily life.
Eldar Shafir is an American psychologist, and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much[1] (with Sendhil Mullainathan). He is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is co-founder and Scientific Director at ideas42, a social-science R&D lab. His area of study is behavioral economics, that is, how the decisions people make affect their financial outcomes. His research has led him to the general conclusion that people often make inadvisable decisions on financial matters when they think they are being rational.
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目录
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. 10 - Efficient use of self-control helps with life issues.
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读书文摘
带宽bandwidth就是心智的容量，包括两种能力，分别为认知能力和执行控制力。稀缺会降低所有这些带宽的容量，致使我们缺乏洞察力和前瞻性，还会减弱我们的执行控制力
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