These anecdotes illustrate a central hypothesis: because the focus on scarcity is involuntary, and because it captures our attention, it impedes our ability to focus on other things. The executive is trying to focus on her daughter’s baseball game, but scarcity keeps pulling her mind away. Even when we try to do something else, the tunnel of scarcity keeps drawing us in. Scarcity in one walk of life means we have less attention, less mind, in the rest of life. The concept of less mind is well studied by psychologists. Though careful research in psychology employs several fine distinctions to
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