Top 35 Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Abundance means freedom from trade-offs.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

2. “When scarcity captures the mind, we become more attentive and efficient.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

3. “Scarcity is not just a physical constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think – whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, or days and weeks. By staying top of mind, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave. When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage, and deal with problems differently.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

4. “Bandwidth measures our computational capacity, our ability to pay attention, to make good decisions, to stick with our plans, and to resist temptations.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

5. “The poor stay poor, the lonely stay lonely, the busy stay busy, and diets fail. Scarcity creates a mindset that perpetuates scarcity.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

6. “Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

7. “One broad theme emerges from decades of this research: the poor are worse parents. They are harsher with their kids, they are less consistent, more disconnected, and thus appear less loving. They are more likely to take out their own anger on the child; one day they will admonish the child for one thing and the next day they will admonish her for the opposite;.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

8. “As Voltaire noted long ago, “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

9. “We pinch pennies on small items, yet we blow dollars on big ones. Our frugality is thereby largely wasted. We spend hours surfing the web to save $50 on a $150 pair of shoes. Yet we forgo a few hours’ search to save a couple of hundred dollars on a $20,000 car. These findings are important because they demonstrate how people routinely violate economists’ standard “rational” models of human behavior.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

10. “The present presses automatically on you. The future does not. To attend to the future requires bandwidth, which scarcity taxes. When scarcity taxes our bandwidth, we become even more focused on the here and now. We need cognitive resources to gauge future needs, and we need executive control to resist present temptations. As it taxes our bandwidth, scarcity focuses on the present, and leads us to borrow.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

11. “We fail to build slack because we focus on what must be done now and do not think enough about all the things that can arise in the future. The present is imminently clear whereas future contingences are less pressing and harder to imagine. When the intangible future comes face to face with the palpable present, slack feels like a luxury.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

12. “Scarcity of any kind, not just time, should yield a focus dividend.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

13. “This is how scarcity taxes bandwidth. The things that distract us, that occupy our mind, need not come from outside us.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

14. “The scarcity mindset can operate with far greater import in one context than in another.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

15. “The focus dividend – heightened productivity when facing a deadline or the accuracy advantage of the blueberry poor – comes from our core mechanism: scarcity captures the mind. The word capture here is essential: this happens unavoidably and beyond our control. Scarcity allows us to do something we could not do easily on our own.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

16. “Recall that a great deal of juggling among the poor comes from fighting everyday fires. If we can help people fight these fires, we will create new bandwidth.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

17. “Scarcity in one walk of life means we have less attention, less mind, in the rest of life.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

18. “Scarcity captures the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

19. “In this view, the vendor falls back into the scarcity trap because she did not have enough slack in her budget to weather the shocks she faces. Shocks bigger than her slack push her right back into the psychology of scarcity.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

20. “A scarcity of guesses in both games meant they could not neglect either one, whereas abundance in one game led them to neglect that game in favor of the one they felt poor on.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

21. “There is already a science of scarcity. You might have heard of it. It’s called economics.” He was right, of course. Economics is the study of how we use our limited means to achieve our unlimited desires; how people and societies manage physical scarcity.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

22. “For example, researchers have documented a bias toward the here and now, which they call hyperbolic discounting, or present bias. We overvalue immediate benefits at the expense of future ones: this is why it is hard to save, to go to the gym, or to do your taxes early.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

23. “Here was an expert who had spent years perfecting her craft, yet one of her best dishes was created under intense pressure, in a couple of hours.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

24. “The poor have their own planes in the air. They are juggling rent, loans, late bills, and counting days till the next paycheck. Their bandwidth is used up in managing scarcity.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

25. “We often associate scarcity with its most dire consequences. This was how we had initially conceived of this book – the poor mired in debt; the busy perpetually behind on their work. Amanda Cohen’s experience illustrates another side of scarcity, a side that can easily go undetected: scarcity can make us more effective.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

26. “Diets prove difficult precisely because they focus us on that which we are trying to avoid.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

27. “Even in a country like the United States, poverty is stark. Nearly 50 percent of all children in the United States will at some point be on food stamps. About 15 percent of American households had trouble finding food for the family at some point during the year.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

28. “Why do we borrow when we face situations of scarcity? We borrow because we tunnel. And when we borrow, we dig ourselves deeper in the future. Scarcity today creates more scarcity tomorrow.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

29. “Any slight instability is a threat hovering over a life lived at the edge of a scarcity trap, because with little slack to absorb it, instability is almost certain to be felt.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

30. “We all have had experiences where we did remarkable things when we had less, when we felt constrained.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

31. “Immediate scarcity looms large, and important things unrelated to it will be neglected. When.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

32. “Like the dieters, the money poor, and the lonely, these blueberry-poor subjects are taxed by scarcity.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

33. “Rather, what the study shows is that cost-benefit considerations do not determine whether we tunnel. Scarcity captures our minds automatically. And when it does, we do not make trade-offs using a careful cost-benefit calculus.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

34. “This is a basic feature of the mind: focusing on one thing inhibits competing concepts. Inhibition is what happens when you are angry with someone, and it is harder to remember their good traits: the focus on the annoying traits inhibits positive memories.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

35. “Here we see that slack provides a hidden efficiency. It gives us room to maneuver, to reshuffle when we err. Slack gives us room to fail.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

36. “Scarcity captures our minds automatically. And when it does, we do not make trade-offs using a careful cost-benefit calculus. We tunnel on managing scarcity both to our benefit and to our detriment.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

37. “How smart do you feel after a night of no sleep? How sharp would you be the next morning? Our study revealed that simply raising monetary concerns for the poor erodes cognitive performance even more than being seriously sleep deprived.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan

38. “The core of the problem is a lack of slack.”

— Sendhil Mullainathan