Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (19 page)

In both of these cases, the key feature of scarcity—that it grabs attention—turns into a hindrance. Dieters and the lonely struggle with their scarcity precisely because scarcity makes them focus on every detail.

The poor stay poor, the lonely stay lonely, the busy stay busy, and diets fail. Scarcity creates a mindset that perpetuates scarcity. If all this seems bleak, consider the alternative viewpoint: the poor are poor because they lack skills. The lonely are lonely because they are unlikable; dieters lack willpower; and the busy are busy because they lack the capacity to organize their lives. In this alternative view, scarcity is the consequence of deep personal problems, very difficult to change.

The scarcity mindset, in contrast, is a contextual outcome, more
open to remedies. Rather than a personal trait, it is the outcome of environmental conditions brought on by scarcity itself, conditions that can often be managed. The more we understand the dynamics of how scarcity works upon the human mind, the more likely we can find ways to avoid or at least alleviate the scarcity trap.

Before you criticize someone
, you

should walk a mile in their shoes. That

way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile

away and you have their shoes.

—
JACK HANDEY,
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
WRITER

Poverty is surely the most widespread and important example of scarcity. The breadth and depth of poverty in the modern world is striking. UNICEF estimates that
22,000 children die each day
due to poverty.
Nearly one billion people are so illiterate
that they cannot even sign their names.
Half the children in the world
live below the global poverty line. Roughly 1.6 billion people live without electricity. 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.

We have thus far treated the varieties of scarcity as if they were interchangeable. We have bounced from dieting to deep poverty to time pressure with little concern for the differences. This, after all, is our thesis. If scarcity evokes a unique psychology irrespective of its source, then we are free to treat the varieties of scarcity all the same. If there is a common psychology of scarcity, shouldn’t everything we observe about the poor also hold for the busy or for dieters?

Just
because the different forms of scarcity share common ingredients does not mean they will have similar outcomes. In chemistry, the same basic elements can produce different compounds, depending on the proportions. Carbon and oxygen can form carbon dioxide—an essential ingredient for the cycle of life—or they can form
carbon monoxide, a deadly pollutant
. Same ingredients, very different outcomes. Our analysis of scarcity follows a similar logic. There are the common ingredients: tunneling, borrowing, a lack of slack, the bandwidth tax. But these play themselves out in different ways, depending on the context. In the case of money scarcity, borrowing is an obvious feature. In the case of loneliness, however, it is unclear what borrowing even means. That particular ingredient, like that additional atom of oxygen, is simply missing in the case of the lonely.
The ingredients of poverty create circumstances that are particularly hostile
to the scarcity mindset.

A well-to-do professional who is very busy is in that situation because he has taken on many projects. He would be less busy if he simply took on fewer. He could, in effect, choose to have less scarcity. The extent of his scarcity is, to some extent, discretionary.

This discretion provides a critical safety valve that can limit scarcity’s stress and damage. The tourist frantically trying to see Italy in a week can only get so worked up about her scarcity of time. At some point, she may simply say, “Forget this, I’ll just see the Colosseum on another visit,” or, “I’ll stay another day in Rome and see less of the south.” This safety valve limits the damage and depth of the scarcity trap. For those who have some discretion, the scarcity trap threatens but only so much. The overcommitted can miss a few deadlines. Dieters can take a break from their diet. The busy can take vacations.

One cannot take a vacation from poverty. Simply deciding not to be poor—even for a bit—is never an option. There is no equivalent in the world of poverty to the dieter deciding to live with being overweight or the busy person giving up on some of his ambitions. It would be silly to suggest that the rural poor in India should cope
with money scarcity by simply moderating their desires. Basic desires, for clothing, freedom from disease, even modest toys to bring joy to one’s children, are significantly harder to cast off. The poor are not alone in having mandated scarcity. The dieter who faces a serious medical condition, the profoundly lonely, and those who are busy because they must work two jobs to pay the rent all have little choice. A lack of discretion makes for a particularly extreme form of scarcity.

This discussion clarifies what we mean by poverty. We mean cases of economic scarcity where changing what you want, or think you need, is simply not viable. Some of these hard-to-change needs are biological, such as hunger for the subsistence farmer, and some are socially constructed. What we feel we need depends on what others have and on what we’ve gotten used to. Indoor plumbing, for example, would hardly make anyone in the developed world feel terribly lucky these days, yet it was pretty much inconceivable until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it is still a dream in many places today. To the subsistence farmer, it is a luxury; to someone living in New Jersey, it is a necessity. Driving a car was a status symbol in the fifties and remains so in many parts of the world. In other parts of the world today, it is a necessity. A deep and complicated question is: How exactly do these needs compare? Does the poor American who cannot afford adequate plumbing really feel a lot like the poor farmer who cannot afford a shirt or the poor European who cannot afford a car? There is too little evidence to know how comparable these two forms of poverty—absolute versus relative—are psychologically. For our purposes, they are all examples of poverty.

Poverty is extreme in another way. Consider the parents of a newborn, who are suddenly time scarce. They also do not have the option to “want less”; the baby needs to be taken to the doctor, and fed, and changed, and cuddled, and bathed, and rocked (forever) to sleep. There are just so many nondiscretionary activities to juggle. But if you are a parent with money, your time scarcity can be alleviated
in another way. You can hire a nanny or a maid, order in food rather than cook, use an accountant, employ a gardener, all of which will free up time. Similarly, if you are on a diet, with plenty of money, you can buy tasty but healthy food. Money, because it is fungible, can be used to compensate for other forms of scarcity.

The reverse—trying to alleviate the scarcity of money—is much harder. Sure, you can try to work a few more hours, but in most cases you don’t have much to give, and it will bring limited extra wealth and leave you even busier and more exhausted. Less money means less time. Less money means it is harder to socialize. Less money means lower quality and less healthy food. Poverty means scarcity in the very commodity that underpins almost all other aspects of life.

We have used the psychology of scarcity to create an empathy bridge. We have used experience with one form of scarcity (say, time) to connect to another form (money). Having known what it’s like to badly need a little more time, we might start to imagine what it’s like to desperately need a little more money or even more friends. We used this bridge to draw a connection between a busy manager fretting about insufficient time before a deadline and a person short on cash fretting about insufficient funds to pay rent.

This empathy bridge, though, only goes so far. After all, the manager can say, “Forget it. I’ll just strive less and alter my work–life balance,” whereas the person stressed for cash can’t simply say, “Forget it. I don’t need the apartment after all.” So while both time and money can tax bandwidth, the
magnitude
of those taxes—their gravity—can be very different.

Most conversations about poverty feature an elephant in the room.

Take the case of diabetes, which affects
285 million people worldwide
. It is a serious disease with consequences that include coma,
blindness, limb amputations, and death. Luckily, it is now a manageable disease. Drugs taken regularly—sometimes in pill form, sometimes with an injection—can prevent diabetes from doing too much damage. Yet diabetes remains a major problem. Part of the problem is pharmacology: medicine has not fully cured the disease. But a bigger part of the problem is psychology. For any medicine to work, people must take it. Yet diabetics
take their medication only 50 to 75 percent of the time
, greatly reducing its efficacy.

Think of how striking this is. Decades of medical research transform a debilitating, deadly disease into a manageable one. But we trip up on the last mile, on the most trivial step: taking a pill or shot. This last mile plagues much of medicine. Twenty years ago, we would have been ecstatic to have the antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV that we have today. Yet millions have died because they did not take the medications consistently. For tuberculosis, the problem is so large that the standard delivery protocol in developing countries, DOTS (directly observed therapy), is designed just to address this problem: someone comes every day to watch you take the pill. In some countries, we cannot afford to provide tuberculosis medication. Not because the pills are expensive—they are cheap antibiotics—but because the cost of DOTS is too high. One remarkable medical achievement after another stumbles on nonadherence, this vagary of human behavior.

Nonadherence affects many people, but it is particularly concentrated in one group: the poor. While people at every income level may fail to take their medications, the poor do so most often. Disease after disease—HIV, diabetes, tuberculosis—the same pattern repeats itself. No matter the location, the kind of medication, or the side effects, one thing stays the same: the poor take their medication least consistently.

Moving to a very different context, consider the case of agricultural yields. The amount of crop that can be grown on a plot of land affects all of society. It determines food prices, world trade, environmental impacts, and even the feasible population of the planet. It
matters perhaps most of all to the farmer: his entire income depends on his yield. As with medicine, technology has made terrific strides in improving yields and sustainability: better seeds, farming techniques, and organic farming methods. Yet like the doctors above, agricultural scientists who work on these issues are continuously vexed by one thing: farmer behavior.

For thousands of years, farmers have known that weeding dramatically improves crop yields. Weeds suck away nutrients and water from the main crop. Weeding requires little skill or machinery, merely some tedious work. Yet farmers in the poorest parts of the world fail to weed. Some estimate that losses from not weeding in parts of Africa are
more than 28 percent of total yield
. In Asia, uncontrolled weed growth has been estimated to cost
up to 50 percent of total rice output
. It’s possible that these estimates are too large. But even a 10 percent increase in yield would be a fantastic return for a couple of days of tedious work. Besides, since weeding increases output without using more money or land, a 10 percent increase in yield means a 20 to 30 percent increase in earnings, a pretty hefty sum. Nonetheless, many farmers leave this money on the table by failing to weed regularly or enough. And even within these areas, the biggest offenders are again the poorest farmers.

To move to yet another example, take parenting. Researchers have now spent a great deal of time studying how people raise their children. Do parents raise their voices needlessly? Do they show love and support in times of need? Are they consistent in their application of rules, or do they make demands that are haphazard and arbitrary? Do they give positive feedback when the child does well? How much do they engage with the child as opposed to plopping her in front of the TV? Do they help with homework?

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;
they fail to engage with their children in substantive ways
; they assist less often with the homework;
they will have the kid watch television rather than read to her
. We now know more about what makes for a good home environment, and poor parents are less likely to provide it.

The poor fall short in many ways.
The poor in the United States are more obese
. In most of the developing world,
the poor are less likely to send their children to school
. The poor do not save enough.
The poor are less likely to get their children vaccinated
. The poorest in a village are the ones
least likely to wash their hands
or treat their water before drinking it. When they are pregnant, poor women are
less likely to eat properly or engage in prenatal care
. We could go on. And on.

These facts follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent (to butcher T. S. Eliot). The overwhelming question in this case is an old, almost tired one. Why do the poor fail so badly and in so many ways?

This is the elephant in the room.

When we do confront the disturbing facts, it is natural first to question their interpretation. Perhaps the poor are not “failing” to take their medication; perhaps these pills are simply too expensive. Why do they not weed? Because they are too busy. Why do they not parent better? Because they grew up in similar circumstances and have not been taught other parenting skills. Surely, all these issues of access and cost and skills play some role. But time after time, when you look at the data, these factors alone cannot explain the failures. For example, the poor in the United States who are on Medicaid pay nothing for their medications, yet they fail to take them regularly. The poor in rural areas report that their time is abundant between harvests, yet they do not weed. These failings cannot be
dismissed as merely circumstantial: at the core there is a problem of behavior.

Another instinctive response is to question the facts themselves. Whether the poor fail or not is really in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps they are not failing. Perhaps those who created the data are biased. There is plenty of compelling psychology to back up such assertions. In one study, for example, subjects watch
a video of a young girl, Hannah, taking a test
. Her performance is ambiguous: she gets some hard questions right and some easy ones wrong. One group of subjects sees Hannah against a background that suggests she comes from a poor family; another sees a background suggestive of an upper-middle-class family. Both groups watch her take the test and then gauge her performance and abilities. Those who observed “poor” Hannah saw more errors, judged that she did worse, and guessed she was at a lower grade level than those who observed “rich” Hannah.