Scarcity

What Hacker News says

1. jack2312Dec 2023
   I don't believe that IQ tests are designed with a bias for or against the poor, so I'm not going to argue either side of that.

   I would like to point out however that poverty (or even a hypothetical worry about financial matters) has been shown to reduce fluid intelligence (which IQ tests measure) significantly. This is because people facing poverty have less mental bandwidth. The effect is strong enough to bring a person with "superior" IQ down to "average", or an "average" IQ down to "borderline deficient".

   If you're interested in the subject, I'd highly recommend the book _Scarcity_ by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. If you'd like a shorter and more concise version, there's also an article titled "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine about the book that summarizes it quite well.

   I'm not an expert on the subject though, so if anyone has reference to any evidence that poverty has no effect on IQ testing, I'd (sincerely) be interested to see it, to get a different perspective.

   [0]: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarc...

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2. jack2312Dec 2023
   To anyone interested in how poverty (and scarcity in general) affects our mental state, and thus our ability to function well and improve our lives, I'd highly recommend the book _Scarcity_ by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. I've found it quite illuminating and interesting. It's written from an academic perspective, so it has plenty of research behind it, and the narrative flow is not bad.

   If you want something more concise and to the point, the article "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine provides a pretty good summary of the book.

   The themes from the book complement those in the article fairly well.

   [0]: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarc...

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3. jhapMay 2021
   I recommend the book Scarcity for anyone interested in learning more about the psychology behind this. It was written Mullainathan and Shafir, both stars in their respective fields.
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4. tomcat27Dec 2020
   let me guess you are under 30?

   when someone has a spouse, two kids, a mortgage to pay, a whole bunch of daily chores to finish, pressure from manager to finish under tight deadlines, a simple depth first search looks like a very big problem at the end of the day.

   People pay cognitive tax that robs them from doing intellectually difficult tasks. This is well documented in behavioral economics. "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir"

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5. yborisJan 2020
   An excellent read about this topic:

   Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir)

   The authors, through empirical research (awesome experiments) show that scarcity (poverty) makes people perform worse on IQ tests by ~17 points (which they regain as soon as scarcity disappears). Poverty makes day to day living an endless barrage of difficult decision making.

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6. sriram_malharFeb 2019
   "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" - by Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir.

   Access to scarce resources induces a particular scarcity mindset, which the authors -- both behavioural economists at Harvard and MIT respectively -- show with a large variety of well-chosen examples.

   The kicker is that time is one of those resources. In other words, I may be economically well-off, but if I'm short of time, I adopt the same scarce mindset that poor people (poor in money terms). I fritter away my time, I don't save it and so on. This book really showed me to deal with my time as carefully as I deal with my money. Great read, of the Freakonomics kind.

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