Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

A surprising and intriguing examination of how scarcity—and our flawed responses to it—shapes our lives, our society, and our culture

Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do organizations get stuck firefighting? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that they are all examples of a mind-set produced by scarcity.

Drawing on cutting-edge research from behavioral science and economics, Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, why students and busy executives mismanage their time, and why sugarcane farmers are smarter after harvest than before. Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus.
Mullainathan and Shafir discuss how scarcity affects our daily lives, recounting anecdotes of their own foibles and making surprising connections that bring this research alive. Their book provides a new way of understanding why the poor stay poor and the busy stay busy, and it reveals not only how scarcity leads us astray but also how individuals and organizations can better manage scarcity for greater satisfaction and success.

What is Everything Else?

Everything Else is a product category on Amazon that is meant to be a catch-all for items that don’t fit into any other categories. Over time, as the Amazon catalog has grown and more specific product categories have been added, Everything Else has become less useful and more of a junkyard for cast off and forgotten listings.

Until recently, however.

Why are items listed in Everything Else when they shouldn’t be?

The answer to this is fairly simple. Some sellers are using Everything Else as an opportunity to get around Amazon’s gated category requirements. For example, DVDs with an MSRP of over $25 are now gated  Selling certain products and bran… More and require permission to list. So we’ve seen some sellers create new listings in Everything Else to get around these requirements. We’ve noticed similar “workarounds” for other gated or restricted  Selling certain product categorie… More categories as well.

Amazon doesn’t like this. It just makes the catalog more of a mess than it already is and ends up creating a worse customer experience.

Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

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