Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

by Sendhil Mullainathan

Imagine that you are surfing the web on your laptop. On a reasonably fast computer, you easily go from page to page. But imagine now that there are many other programs open in the background. You have some music playing, files downloading, and a bunch of browser windows open. Suddenly, you are crawling, not surfing, the web. These background programs are eating up processor cycles. Your browser is limping along because it has less computing power to work with. Scarcity does something similar to our mental processor. By constantly loading the mind with other processes, it leaves less “mind” for the task at hand. This leads us to the central hypothesis of this chapter: scarcity directly reduces bandwidth—not a person’s inherent capacity but how much of that capacity is currently available for use.