کتاب پرپیمان درباره روانشناسی کمیابی است. ساده و روان نوشته شده و به نظرم برای غیرمتخصصهای حوزه توسعه محرومیتزدایی و فقر هم قابل فهم است.
یکی از نکات تحسینبرانگیز نویسندگانش حجم بالای پژوهشها و مطالعاتی است که مرور کرده و از دلش نکاتی را استخراج کردهاند. نگاه جدیدی به آدم میدهد هم در مورد زندگی شخصی خد و هم حوزه کاری مرتبط با توسعه What do you know, having too much to do can cause one to lose focus, become scatterbrained, and experience frustration, And I'll be, working under pressure can lead to increased productivity if not better results,
The authors' anecdotes were amusing, But overall this book was more "duh" than epiphany, I'd hoped to learn something new, but instead I feel like this was apage exercise in being preached to by a pair of ivory tower dwellers who probably have wasted valuable resources theirs and mine to tell me what I think I already know.
I'm not so sure my scarce time and effort were best spent on this outing, Yawn.
When people are preoccupied with a lack of something, they find it harder to function,
There. I said it. That's the book. That's the whole goddamn book,
Here I was, trying to expand my mind with nonfiction only to confirm that there's more truth and joy to be had in fiction, For me, at least. This book whose authors are fantastic at TED talks, I'm told says what it needs to say in the first fifteen pages and drags out its basic, basic concept for the rest.
The stories and studies mentioned are interesting, no doubt, but a sincere waste of your time if you understand the idea upfront,
Read the introduction and be done with it, There is no scarcity of books about the brain and psychology and emotion, In fact, the shelves are groaning with them, But here's a psychological take on what you might regard as a problem of economics and that makes it genuinely fascinating, So it's a shame that it doesn't work better as a book but this is one of those titles that you will want to read despite that,
The authors Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir look at the nature of scarcity and, crucially, the effect it has on human performance, You might hear the term and think it's about going hungry and that is one example of scarcity but they also look at what happens when money, time and even friends are in short supply.
Although they aren't exact analogues, all have related impacts on us as human beings,
By referencing the best available studies and doing a few of their own, the authors come to some important conclusions, Scarcity isn't all bad. It concentrates the mind gives us focus, But there is a price to pay for being in that tunnel, It means that other essential aspects of life get ignored, And, most strikingly, what the authors call 'bandwidth' a combination of cognitive ability and ability to concentrate is reduced, They call this a 'bandwidth tax',
So far, so engaging, We aren't just offered the symptoms and diagnosis, but also some attempts to counter this, Pointing out, for instance, that it's better for people to make decisions and learn things when they are going through a good phase than through scarcity, However I have two problems with this as a book, One is that while it's no textbook, it really isn't particularly readable it takes a really interesting subject and makes it a bit dull, And the other is that there are strong signs that this is really a magazine article, not a book, For page after page the same thing is said in subtly different ways, If I see the word 'bandwidth' again today, I'll scream, The meat of this book could easily fit in,words,
So, paradoxically, I do urge you to read the book, as the subject is well worth exploring but I can't promise that you will enjoy the experience.
کتاب فقر احمق می کند جدا از اسم توهین آمیز آن یک اثر بی ارزش است که عناوین و مطالب آن بیشتر همانند روزنامه های اقتصادی یا مطالب کلی هستند که شاید هر کس آنها را به طریقی بداند.
نوشتن کتابهایی این گونه بسیار ساده است کتابی که تقصیر و بار مسئولیت را به گردن فرد می اندازد و گویی جامعه یا سیاست یا شرایط اقتصادی هیچ گونه نقشی ندارد به این ترتیب تمامی مشکلات به گردن طبقه فقیرکه متاسفانه در عنوان کتاب به نوعی احمق هم شناخته شده اند انداخته می شود.
کتاب مرا یاد نصیحت های شیرین پدربزرگ ها ومادربزرگ ها می اندازد بدون آنکه اندکی از شیرینی و حلاوت حرفهای آنان را داشته باشد و این که موعظه های کتاب یک سری حرفهای کلی امتحان پس نداده و خام هستند. کتابی بسیار جالب با بررسی و دیدی نو به تاثیر مشکلات و دغدغه های انسان بر ذهنش مطالبی که مسئله های زیادی رو برای شما روشن می سازه. Addendum, March: An excellent short version of this book is at sitelinkThe Science of Scarcity: A behavioral economists fresh perspectives on poverty at the Harvard Alumni magazine.
Thanks to Jeff for recommending it,
Are the poor to blame for their poverty For their flawed choices
Are the overweight, struggling with a diet What about those who complain of being too busy What about the lonely
What these have in common is scarcity, something that economists have always studied.
But until fairly recently, the idea of studying cognition, or feelings, from an economic perspective would have been absurd, or even heretical, The field of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics has changed that, and took off like a rocket when Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics,
What Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir focus on is how the human mind functions when it perceives scarcity there are predictable cognitive changes that most of would describe as seriously dysfunctional.
The term is “scarcity trap”, and the basic idea is that our brains so tightly focus on what is so desperately lacking that thinking about anything else becomes tremendously difficult.
Like several other cognitive problems, this was undoubtedly evolutionarily adaptive for our paleolithic ancestors so under some circumstances, it probably remains beneficial, but nevertheless outside of our control,
The result is revelatory there are profound implications for how our governments poverty programs should function, for what diets are likely to work, or even how overly busy parents of newborn or sick, etc.
children react.
This is an important book, perhaps even a critical book, We all have seen discussions of inequality gain attention across the political spectrum, and throughout the world, sitelinkPikketys book brought it to a head in the blogosphere, but wed been watching the Occupy andmovement for some time,
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much tells us that in many ways, the situation is worse than we thought, Not only are we tolerating economic and social policies that worsen the situation of more and more people with each passing year, it seems that being poor creates cognitive problems that make the burden even tougher to overcome.
Scarcity is the curse, The subconscious perception of scarcity changes how we think in ways that are detrimental to escaping whatever is causing scarcity in the first place,
This probably wasnt always so, We can imagine, once upon a time, a world that was so much less complicated that the mechanisms described here didnt backfire, and instead helped those individuals get back on their feet.
Note that poverty, while it is the form of scarcity that deserves the most attention, is definitely not the only one that is addressed in the book.
More on that below.
That scarcity is the cause of the problem and not the result requires a significant conceptual reframing,
Lets go through the paradigm they lay out:
The authors start out exploring focus under conditions of scarcity, If two people are told to identify words flashing very, very quickly before them on a screen, it turns out that hunger will increase the effectiveness of recognition of words associated with food, without decreasing effectiveness of other words.
This focus is a good thing, right There are many, many examples where that is precisely what we want,
What is happening is that scarcity causes adjustments to be made by unconscious parts of the brain, and the attention of our conscious brain is much more easily “captured” by stimuli that respond to that scarcity.
We cant control it, we cant avoid it that point is made time and again by the evidence presented here,
The word they use to describe this is tunneling, When scarcity causes us to focus, we descend into a cognitive tunnel, and aspects of the world that dont deal with that allimportant need become increasingly invisible to us.
We can even become completely oblivious, Even when voluntarily focusing, this is evident, Weve all been so deeply engrossed in something reading, playing a video game, watching a tense movie that we are startled by someone telling us theyd been trying to get our attention for some time.
Those unperceived stimuli have been inhibited from arriving in our awareness, Other objectives we might have otherwise thought important can be eliminated from our consideration by goal inhibition, A salient example the authors give is the neglect of a firefighter to fasten their seatbelt in the urgent rush from the station to a burning building although the scarcity here is of time, not money.
But if it is scarcity that is causing the tunneling, we cant escape it easily, and fall into it more readily even when we do escape, What tunneling reflects is a lack of bandwidth, The term is annoyingly contemporary, but quite apropos, because like the cyber term it encompasses two related but different resources, Tunneling taxes both our cognitive capacity i, e. , “intelligence” as well as our executive control i, e. , “discipline”.
Another way of perceiving this tunneling is very revealing, A common way of prioritizing a todo list is to rank each item by both urgency and importance, Something that is urgent, but not important, might be ranked higher than something that is important, but not urgent, correctupdate: Ive recently learned this is often known as the sitelinkEisenhower matrix.
Tunneling forces us to focus intensely on this urgent need, even if a fully reasoning mind would tells us to act on something else as more critical.
This seems counterintuitive, but the book provides plenty of supporting evidence, What this means is that what is merely important, but not urgent, is consistently suppressed,
For example, replacing seriously worn tires on the car is important, of course, but at no point is it necessarily urgent until it is too late, Dental care, same thing. Budgeting for longterm but completely predictable expenditure is important, but to someone tunneling through life, with two jobs with variable hours, child care troubles, etc, they will very often be surprised to discover that yet another important has crept up to their dismay, Im pretty certain youd realize youve fallen into this trip many times hopefully not catastrophically,
Even when they emerge from that cognitive tunnel, their troubles wont be over, of course, This is where juggling comes in: suddenly all those other important things are visible, but there isnt enough time or energy or slack to consider them, much less money in the bank account.
The stress is likely to kick them straight back into a scarcity mindset, one where the “bandwidth tax” imposed by scarcity affects their intelligence and discipline,
Just to remind us that all of these problems arent just relegated to the poor, who we might privately suspect are dysfunctional anyway, the authors provide several counterexamples.
By way of an empirical analysis, they quiz strangers in a mall, After getting some socioeconomic data, the intelligence of the participants is tested, Then they are asked a key question, and then their intelligence is tested some more, The key question is one designed to selectively trigger the scarcitycapture phenomena, Half of the subjects are asked how they would deal with a sudden emergency car repairs that cost aboutfor the other half, the figure is bumped up to.
For those at the high end of the economic scale, there was no change in the intelligence testing, But for those downscale, the later questions showed a significant cognitive deficit, as much as fourteen IQ points, which at least temporarily would make them “borderline deficient”,
Another empirical sitelinkstudy looked at how air traffic controllers interact with their families, On days when the air traffic load was low, the controllers had a cognitively easy day, and went home and appeared to engage with their children in a stereotypically upper or middleclass manner.
On days when the job was especially tough, their interactions with their family were troubled and reminiscent of a stereotypical lowerclass family,
The effect of scarcity is seen across cultures and in diverse domains, Quite a few of the studies cited take place among struggling farmers or impoverished street vendors in India, Others involve struggles with diets a “scarcity” of permissible calories, in effect or loneliness a “scarcity” of social interaction,
In fact, the book is chock full of interesting examples, Some are illustrative justso stories or telling anecdotes, but the forty pages of endnotes are tied to the large volume of empirical evidence, This weight of substantiation is necessary because the message is counterparadigmatic, While we often remind ourselves not to blame the victim in some contexts, that is still pervasive in many domains, Even among those on the political left, policies often assume that the poor dont understand something, when the theory of scarcityinduced cognitive deficits would tell us instead that they dont have the money/time/energy to act on what they often quite well know.
The numerous examples of how busyness or dietary failures among the notimpoverished leads to the same kind of flawed behavior is a salutary reminder that this isnt a phenomena of poverty, but part of human cognition.
Unfortunately, the mass of examples gets in the way of clarity, There might be too much narrative those that are unfamiliar with the state of cognitive research might be uneasy enough with the evolving argument, and dismiss the conclusions, sticking with their preexisting opinions.
Actually, it is worse: most people whose preexisting opinions lean in the other direction are probably wary enough of cognitive research that they wont even open this book,
Even if this book was only about poverty, the implications really are staggering, As the authors say, “one prevailing view explains the strong correlation between poverty and failure to make good choices in life, etc, by saying that failure causes poverty, Our data suggest causality runs at least as strongly in the other direction: that poverty the scarcity mindset causes failure, ” This book tells us that we should be reexamining all of our policies and social adjustment mechanisms from a different angle, not just because they would be more effective, but also because of the fundamental unfairness of creating obstacles that perversely can make peoples situation worse.
But this is an academic book, There is no sense of outrage to incite change through passion, It doesnt make the dire predictions of Piketty, stirring controversy and wider discussion, Many of those reading this will respond: “Oh, yeah, Duh!”
This is a fivestar book because awareness of this theory and its profound social and political implications needs to be elevated, Please read it even as a selfhelp book in your own life I rearranged my daily habits to make sure this review got written something that otherwise I might have considered important, but not quite urgent.
But the goal, really, is to think about it enough that it changes ones perspective of the struggle of many of our fellow humans,
update: Good tiein to the current political discussion about how economic injustice leads to social injustice: sitelink The Psychological Argument for a Universal Basic Income .
Personally, I think the best argument for a UBI instead of a higher Minimum Wage is that the technological unemployment of the coming decades is going to make it harder and harder for many people to be employed at all, and a high Minimum Wage isnt much of a social safety net for the unemployed.
I havent seen a plausible plan for a UBI yet, but it is probably going to be needed for social stability,
sitelink
Excellent reviews and articles from around the web:
From the Economist, sitelinkDays late, dollars short: Those with too little have a lot on their mind.
From the New York Books, sitelinkIt Captures Your Mind,
From the Guardian, sitelinkScarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much: A study showing how poverty impairs judgment has farreaching implications,
From Pacific Standard, sitelinkHow Being Poor Makes You Poor: New research shows how poverty can often be a selfperpetuating trap,
From the author Sendhil Mullainathan, in the New York Times, sitelinkThe Mental Strain of Making Do With Less,
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Fetch Your Copy Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Written By Sendhil Mullainathan Conveyed In Pamphlet
Sendhil Mullainathan