Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

by Sendhil Mullainathan

Families with no college experience tripled their submission rate if they received help in filling out the forms.

Give someone a form to take home and she may forget it; have her fill it out on site and enrollment goes way up.

often are required to “recertify”—to complete a series of forms—every year to show that they are still eligible. As you might imagine, it is during these periods of recertification that people drop out of the program. And this requirement appears often to screen out the most needy: those who are most taxed are also those most likely to delay in recertifying and, unfortunately, the ones in greatest need of the benefit.

The crunch just before a deadline often originates with ample time used ineffectively in the weeks preceding it.

In a world of scarcity, long deadlines are a recipe for trouble.

A way to fight the abundance-then-scarcity cycle is to even it out—to create long periods of moderation rather than spurts of abundance followed by heightened periods of scarcity.

trapped. It is not merely that we fail to smooth our activities under abundance; it is that we fail to leave slack for the future.

hints. For one, the data suggest that we tend to underappreciate the likelihood of many low-probability events.

What could interfere with your plans are not just floods or earthquakes, but you may get sick, or a family member could get sick, or there could be a break-in,

And that buffer stock needs to be built during times of abundance. If time is where you expect scarcity, this means leaving some extra room in your schedule, for “no good reason,”

Have you ever said, “I don’t want to make this important decision now; my bandwidth is taxed?”

We schedule and manage our time but not our bandwidth. And it is striking how little we notice or attend to our own fluctuating cognitive capacities.

If our job were to move boxes from one place to another, we’d have a better sense of how best to maximize our efficiency—when to exert more effort, when to rest. But for a job focused on moving ideas rather than boxes, we know little about how to maximize our limited cognitive capacity.

In a program for the unemployed, we focus on reemployment. Undoubtedly, that is important. But why not also gauge its impact on bandwidth?

The data show that the children of parents who are unemployed do significantly worse in school. If bandwidth is the culprit and we can do something to alleviate it, then these programs may have benefits far outside their initial scope.

products, logistical interventions, or working conditions that help workers deal with financial volatility and help clear some bandwidth?

Take the simple example of adherence: the poor, more than others, fail to take their medication as prescribed. We could say, “This is a fact of life,” and move on, no longer trusting the poor to do what’s required. Or we could build a product like GlowCaps. This pill bottle kicks into action whenever it has not been opened the right number of times that day. It starts by glowing, and if it still hasn’t been opened, it beeps, eventually sending text messages to the user’s phone. Little by little, it makes its annoyance known, preventing the neglect that comes with tunneling.

When we think about increasing farm productivity around the world, perhaps we should focus not on new crops or farmer training. Perhaps we should be thinking about how to get the farmers to do those small activities, such as weeding, which they surely already know about but so often remain outside their tunnel.

Many of us end up tight for time right before a deadline because we wasted the preceding period of abundance.

The experience of scarcity near the deadline often emerges because of how time was managed during abundance.