What is striking in our data is that subjects were randomly assigned to be poor: they were no different from the “rich” except for the flip of a coin. Clearly, both groups in this study, rich and poor, should show an equal amount of present bias. In fact, any attempt to analyze myopic thinking at the level of personal differences between rich and poor—whether differences in present bias or otherwise—would need to somehow explain how scarcity led to borrowing in our present contexts, where rich and poor were created at random and could not have been more alike.
