
How Scarcity Trap Affects Our Thinking, Behavior - marojejian
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/02/259082836/how-scarcity-mentaly-affects-our-thinking-behavior
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PeterWhittaker
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.

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lukifer
Good advice. I've converged on a catchphrase/mantra in recent years: "Slow
down to hurry up." Attempting to rush urgent features or fixes can
paradoxically make them take longer to finish.

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gaius
We have a saying in diving, "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Not to mention "breathe, remember to breathe".

Do you remember the first time that, while properly weighted, you descended
effortlessly, just by really exhaling, for real?

I know where I was the first time. It's amazing when it works, and you realize
just how much air you had been holding in your lungs, without being aware of
it. My air consumption dropped after that.

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tom6a
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](http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html)

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ommunist
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.

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

~~~
ommunist
Nope, neither we have time to test html email against variety of clients.

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jeffdavis
"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?

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

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

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michaelochurch
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.

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goggles99
> _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.

