You know how when you are poor you feel like an extra 40 bucks here and there would make all the difference? Right now I feel like an extra 40 or even 20 minutes every once in a while would have a huge impact.
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This doesn’t apply to you because you’re very efficient with your time, but the money-time connection made me recall something I read about a while ago from this harvard economist (Senthil something) who wrote a book about scarcity. The basic idea is that scarcity of anything leads to poor decision-making with respect to that particular thing.
We all know how the right-wing loves to shit upon the poor for their poor money management.
He says, look at me, I’m a professor at harvard. I have money but I have a scarcity of time. So, I tend to make even worse decisions with my time. If I’m asked to be a reviewer or a speaker at a conference, say six months in advance, instead of declining that invitation right away I’ll procrastinate until it is too late and now it would be considered rude to decline, so I have to accept, which makes my time even more scarce. And so on.
He gives other examples, and I’m sure his book is more technical than that, but this is the idea.
So, being poor isn’t a moral failing, or a failing of willpower, or being stupid. Scarcity, whether it is of money or of time or anything else, brings about its own psychological problems. And if we recognized that, we’d have more empathy for each other’s life situations.
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This is the book (I misspelled his name in my comment):
Mullainathan, Sendhil; Shafir, Eldar. Scarcity: why having too little means so much.
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I might read it because it sounds very insightful. Thank you!
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That is so true. A person who is exhausted might not spend an hour s/he suddenly finds on resting but instead might do something that will end up being even more exhausting. And a person who has a mountain of debt might spend money on something that an outsider will see as useless. But for both these people, these are coping strategies. And like all coping strategies they can only be judged if you are familiar with the internal truth of that particular life. Moralizing about these choices points to a scarcity of intellect.
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“A person who is exhausted might not spend an hour s/he suddenly finds on resting but instead might do something that will end up being even more exhausting.”
The classic example of this being the student who spends all night before an exam cramming things in their head instead of getting a good night’s sleep, which is known to be so much more effective with memory retention.
We can even think of scarcity of ‘health’. Does anyone really believe that unhealthy people don’t know that junk food is bad for them?
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