We have all experienced those times when there is just not enough time to get everything done. We probably have experienced a time when we did not have enough money to pay all our bills and meet all our wants. We have probably all been on an extreme diet counting every calorie. These situations describe scarcity. But, the authors, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show us how these kinds of scarcity situations are of the same mindset as poverty. Scarcity behavior may be a key player in the cycle of poverty.
Scarcity is defined as a subjective sense of having more needs than resources. Those needs may be time, money, or any other resource. Scarcity sets up a mental situation, the authors named tunneling, which consumes the "bandwidth" we have available in our brains to solve our dilemmas. Essentially, because we are so focused on solving our immediate problem we neglect to see all options and we neglect to plan for the consequences of our choices. Scarcity and the ensuing tunneling lead us to borrow from tomorrow and to focus on the urgent and not necessarily the important. An important component in the ability to weather a setback or unexpected event is what the authors call slack. Slack is not just extra, it is more than enough. Slack is what allows you to buy a pair of shoes without considering what you must trade-off in order to buy them. Slack is the 35 extra points per week in the Weight Watcher Diet. Without slack, every shock or unexpected or unplanned for event sets up a cycle of catch-up.
Because so much of our brain-power (bandwidth) is used up ruminating on the scarcity (a time crunched project, paying the rent, balancing a difficult life schedule) we may also not have the executive control to properly navigate social and interpersonal situations in the most productive manner. The influence of scarcity on executive control is an interesting contribution to the brain research related to adverse childhood experiences. Mullaninthan and Shafir provide many stories and related research that connect poor parenting to not having the bandwidth to perform well emotionally. Parenting well is a demanding job requiring attention, patience, forethought, all of which are hard to muster when your brain bandwidth is being tunneled into keeping a roof over your kids' head and food in their bellies. Interestingly, worry is bandwidth stealer. Occupied bandwidth can cause significant variance in IQ test results.
This is a simple, yet profound presentation of what may be some key factors to consider and plan for when helping the poor. "Accidents of birth--such as what continent you are born on--have a large effect on your chance of being poor. Still, one prevailing view explains the strong correlation between poverty and failure by saying failure causes poverty." The "data suggest causality runs at least as strongly in the other direction: that poverty--the scarcity of mindset--causes failure." The book is not just problem identification...many valuable solutions are proposed and could be useful to a teacher in his classroom or to a government social program.
