Why can we never seem to keep on top of our workload, social diary or chores? Why does poverty persist around the world? Why do successful people do things at the last minute in a sudden rush of energy? Here, economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir reveal that the hidden side behind all these problems is that they're all about scarcity. We've all struggled with packing a suitcase with too many items and not enough time to do it. In Scarcity, two intellectual adventurers show us that this simple idea explains the most fundamental problems in all walks of life. Using the new science of scarcity, they explain why obesity is rampant; why people find it difficult to sleep when most sleep deprived; and why the lonely find it so hard to make friends. Scarcity will change the way you think about both the little everyday tasks and the big issues of global urgency.
About the author
Sendhil Mullainathan is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His real passion is behavioral economics, understanding what makes people tick - whether a senior executive in New York or a farmer in rural Tamil Nadu.
He enjoys having written but is of a mixed mind about writing.
He also occasionally enjoys doing: he helped co-found a non-profit to apply behavioral science (ideas42); and has worked in government.
Much to the surprise of who know him well, he is a recipient of the MacArthur "genius" award.
His hobbies include basketball, googling and fixing-up classic espresso machines. He also enjoys speaking about himself in the third person, which works well for bios but less well in daily life.
About the author
Eldar Shafir was born in Israel, and has lived in the US for the past 30 years. He is a professor at Princeton University, where he studies and teaches decision making, cognitive science, and behavioral economics. He is co-founder and scientific director at ideas42, a non-for-profit social science R&D lab, where talented people apply behavioral insight in attempts to make the world a slightly better place.
Eldar is Past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable, and Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He has advised at the White House and the Treasury Department, among others. Given people's magnificent talents, he finds their failures remarkable and challenging. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine's 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013.
