Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Read Free Page A

how frequently otherwise clever discussions tend to overlook trade-offs (an oversight that our theory helps explain). Other economic insights come from the recognition that physical scarcity responds to prices, sometimes in unexpected ways. European paleontologists in nineteenth-century China learned this the hard way. Seeking to acquire scarce dinosaur bones, they paid villagers for bone fragments. The result? Supply responded. More bone fragments. When peasants found bones, they would smash them to increase the number of pieces they could sell. Not quite what the paleontologists were hoping for.
    Our approach to scarcity is different. In economics, scarcity is ubiquitous. All of us have a limited amount of money; even the richest people cannot buy everything. But we suggest that while physical scarcity is ubiquitous, the feeling of scarcity is not. Imagine a day at work where your calendar is sprinkled with a few meetings and your to-do list is manageable. You spend the unscheduled time by lingering at lunch or at a meeting or calling a colleague to catch up. Now, imagine another day at work where your calendar is chock-full of meetings. What little free time you have must be sunk into a project that is overdue. In both cases time was physically scarce. You had the same number of hours at work and you had more than enough activities to fill them. Yet in one case you were acutely aware of scarcity, of the finiteness of time; in the other it was a distant reality, if you felt it at all. The feeling of scarcity is distinct from its physical reality.
    Where does the feeling of scarcity come from? Physical limits, of course, play a role—the money in our savings account, the debts we owe, the tasks we must complete. But so does our subjective perception of what matters: how much do we need to accomplish? Howimportant is that purchase? Such desires are shaped by culture, upbringing, even genetics. We may deeply desire something because of our physiology or because our neighbor has it. Just as how cold we feel depends not only on absolute temperature but also on our own private metabolism, so the feeling of scarcity depends on both what is available and on our own tastes. Many scholars—sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and even marketers—have tried to decipher what accounts for these tastes. In this book, we largely avoid that discussion. We let preferences be what they are and focus instead on the logic and the consequences of scarcity: What happens to our minds when we feel we have too little, and how does that shape our choices and our behaviors?
    As a blunt approximation, most disciplines, including economics, say the same thing about this question. The consequence of having less than we want is simple: we are unhappy . The poorer we are, the fewer nice things we can afford—be it a house in a good school district or as little as salt and sugar to flavor our food. The busier we are, the less leisure time we can enjoy—be it watching television or spending time with our families. The fewer calories we can afford, the fewer foods we can savor. And so on. Having less is unpleasant. And it can have repercussions, for example, on health, safety, or education. Scarcity leads to dissatisfaction and struggle .
    While certainly true, we think this misses something critical. Scarcity is not just a physical constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think—whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, or days and weeks. By staying top of mind, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave. When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage, and deal with problems differently. Some fields have studied mindsets created by particular instances of scarcity : how dieting affects mood, or how a particular cultural context might affect the attitudes of the local poor.