How Scarcity Trap Affects Our Thinking, Behavior

tl;dr: When you have plenty of something, you can rationally plan how best to use it, perhaps entertaining and evaluating multiple scenarios - but when something is scarce, you tend to conserve it, doling it out piecemeal for only the most urgent needs.

If that thing is time, you spend it - you spend your time - on the urgent only, foregoing the important but not urgent. Eventually, important items left undone become emergencies themselves.

Moral of the story: No matter how little time you have, always take some time to plan, to prioritize. Breath. Relax. Make haste slowly. Tend to the important emergencies, and the important non-emergencies, and try to ignore the unimportant emergencies, if you can. And take the time to know the difference.

PG would say the type of procrastination in the NPR article (missing the vehicle registration date) is "good" procrastination.

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

Very good example. It shows that our most precious resource is uninterrupted attention. And it is scarce. Because of your uncontrolled Internet habits on the first place. A good reading on that is "The Shallows" by Nick Carr.

So we don't have time to write tests for the code?

"The poor farmer in India might need repeated reminders about weeding. One might not be enough. The minimum wage worker in America might need a couple of extra days to pay her bills instead of being slapped with a fine one day after payment is due."

That is the solution? I am not impressed.

They are also fairly easy to test scientifically, and considering he's a researcher, then why didn't he do so?

I think I'll read it tomorrow when I have more time.

tl;dr urgency and prudence don't go together.

Scarcity (of time and money) seems to generate a bipolar pattern between extreme (and unwise) stinginess and escapist binges when they just want to take a break from being poor. I've also noticed that people who get their cash in volatile distributions (e.g. independent graphic designers) tend to have bad financial sense, because they go from perceived but false richness (someone just gave me $60,000!) to drought. I'd assume there's a similar phenomenon in VC.

>BYLINE: Each September the state of Massachusetts asks one thing from "Scarcity" author and Harvard economist, Sendhil Mullainathan, to renew his car inspection sticker and each year this recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award does the same thing. He's really busy, so on each day leading up to the expiration of the sticker, he tells himself he'll attend to it the next day.

This guy has a serious logic flaw in his way of thinking. It scares me that there are people out there teaching economics in supposedly prominent schools.

It was not scarcity that affected his thinking. It was his irresponsibility. By scarcity of time, the author is including things like watching television, writing a book on the side, ETC. This is a simple case of procrastination.

These are optional things in the same way that someone with a meager income can live in relative comfort in America (never go hungry, wet or cold), Then they decide to buy a fancy new car (though nothing was wrong with their older model Honda). Now they have created a scarcity because they suddenly cannot afford to pay their rent.

It was not the scarcity that affected their thinking and behavior, it was self indulgence and irresponsibility that caused the scarcity if the first place.