Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (3 page)

One advantage of working on something so new is that it can be presented to experts and nonexperts alike. Because our argument relies on a variety of fields, from cognitive science to development economics, few people will be experts in all these areas, and most will be novices for at least some of the material we present. To accommodate this, we have worked hard to make the whole book, even the technical parts, easily accessible to a wide audience. We also use anecdotes and vignettes extensively. Of course, these never serve as substitutes for careful evidence, but they are used to make concepts intuitive, to bring ideas to life. Ultimately, the strength of our argument will naturally rely on the evidence we present. For the readers who would like greater technical detail, we have included extensive endnotes. More than merely providing references, these discuss details of studies presented, mention other studies that seemed too tangential to include but still relevant, and generally
allow you to go even deeper should you find something of particular interest.

This book is not meant to be the final word. It raises a new perspective on an age-old problem, one that ought to be seriously entertained. Anytime there is a new way of thinking, there are also new implications to be derived, new magnitudes to be deciphered, and new consequences to be understood. There is much more to be done, and in that sense our book is an invitation—a front-row seat to a process of discovery.

HOBBES
:
Do you have an idea for your story yet?

CALVIN
: You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.

HOBBES
: What mood would that be?

CALVIN
: Last-minute panic.

—
CALVIN AND HOBBES
BY BILL WATTERSON

One evening not long ago we went to a vegetarian restaurant called Dirt Candy, its name coming from the owner-chef Amanda Cohen’s belief that vegetables are “candy” from the earth. The restaurant was known for a particular dish—the crispy tofu with broccoli served with an orange sauce—that
all the reviewers raved about
. They were right to rave. It was delicious, the table favorite.

Our visit was well timed. We learned the next day that Amanda Cohen was to appear on
Iron Chef
, a popular TV show in which chefs compete by preparing a three-course meal under great time pressure. At the beginning of the show, they learn the surprise ingredient that must be used in every course and have a few hours to design and cook the dishes. The show is extremely popular with aspiring cooks, food connoisseurs, and people who just like looking at food.

Watching the show, we thought Cohen had gotten fantastically lucky. Her surprise ingredient was broccoli, and she of course prepared her signature dish, the one we had just eaten, and the judges
loved it. But Cohen did not get lucky in the way we thought. The surprise ingredient, the broccoli, did not allow her to showcase a dish already in her repertoire. Quite the opposite. Episodes are filmed a year in advance. Instead, as she puts it, “
The Crispy Tofu that’s on the menu
now was created for
Iron Chef
.” She created her signature dish that night. This kind of “luck,” if one can call it that, is even more remarkable. 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.

Of course, this dish was not created from scratch. Creative bursts like this build on
months and years of prior experience and hard work
. The time pressure focuses the mind, forcing us to condense previous efforts into immediate output. Imagine working on a presentation that you need to deliver at a meeting. In the days leading up to the meeting, you work hard but you vacillate. The ideas may be there, but tough choices need to be made on how to pull it all together. Once the deadline closes in, though, there is no more time for dawdling. Scarcity forces all the choices. Abstractions become concrete. Without the last push, you may be creative without producing a final product. Going into her appearance on
Iron Chef
, Cohen had several secret ingredients of her own, ideas she had been playing with for months or even years. Scarcity did not create them. Rather, it pushed her to bring them together into one terrific dish.

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. We all have had experiences where we did remarkable things when we had less, when we felt constrained. Because she was keenly aware of the lack of time, Amanda Cohen focused on pulling everything from her bag of tricks into one great dish. In our theory, when scarcity captures the mind, it focuses our attention on using what we have most effectively. While this can have negative repercussions, it means scarcity
also has benefits. This chapter starts by describing these benefits and then shows the price we pay for them, foreshadowing how scarcity eventually ends in failure.

Some of us hate meetings. Connie Gersick, a leading scholar of organizational behavior,
has made a living out of studying them
. She has conducted numerous detailed qualitative studies to understand how meetings unfold, and how the pattern of work and conversation changes over the course of a meeting. She has studied many kinds of meetings—meetings between students and meetings between managers, meetings intended to weigh options to produce a decision and meetings intended to brainstorm to produce something more tangible like a sales pitch. These meetings could not be more distinct. But in one way they are all the same. They all begin unfocused, the discussions abstract or tangential, the conversations meandering and often far off topic. Simple points are made in lengthy ways. Disagreements are aired but without resolution. Time is spent on irrelevant details.

But then, halfway through the meeting, things change. There is, as Gersick calls it, a
midcourse correction
. The group realizes that time is running out and becomes serious. As she puts it, “The midpoint of their task was the start of a ‘major jump in progress’ when the [group] became concerned about the deadline and their progress so far. [At this point] they settled into a … phase of working together [with] a sudden increase of energy to complete their task.” They hammer out their disagreements, concentrate on the essential details, and leave the rest aside. The second half of the meeting nearly always produces more tangible progress.

The midcourse correction illustrates a consequence of scarcity capturing the mind. Once the lack of time becomes apparent, we focus. This happens even when we are working alone. Picture yourself
writing a book. Imagine that the chapter you are working on is due in several weeks. You sit down to write. After a few sentences, you remember an e-mail that needs attention. When you open your in-box, you see other e-mails that require a response. Before you know it, half an hour has passed and you’re still on e-mail. Knowing you need to write, you return to your few meager sentences. And then, while “writing,” you catch your mind wandering: How long have you been contemplating whether to have pizza for lunch, when your last cholesterol check was, and whether you updated your life insurance policy to your new address? How long have you been drifting from thought to vaguely related thought? Luckily, it is almost time for lunch and you decide to pack up a bit early. As you finish lunch with the friend you haven’t seen in a while, you linger over coffee—after all, you have a couple of weeks for that chapter. And so the day continues; you manage to get in a little bit of writing, but far less than you had hoped.

Now imagine the same situation a month later. The chapter is due in a couple of days, not in several weeks. This time when you sit down to write, you do so with a sense of urgency. When your colleague’s e-mail comes to mind, you press on rather than get distracted. And best of all, you may be so focused that the e-mail may not even register. Your mind does not wander to lunch, cholesterol checks, or life insurance policies. While at lunch with your friend (assuming you didn’t postpone it), you do not linger for coffee—the chapter and the deadline are right there with you at the restaurant. By day’s end this focus pays off: you manage to write a significant chunk of the chapter.

Psychologists have studied the benefits of deadlines in more controlled experiments. In one study,
undergraduates were paid to proofread three essays
and were given a long deadline: they had three weeks to complete the task. Their pay depended on how many errors they found and on finishing on time; they had to turn in all the essays by the third week. In a nice twist, the researchers created a second group with more scarcity—tighter deadlines. They had to
turn in one proofread essay every week, for the same three weeks. The result? Just as in the thought experiment above, the group with tighter deadlines was more productive. They were late less often (although they had more deadlines to miss), they found more typos, and they earned more money.

Deadlines do not just increase productivity. Second-semester college seniors, for example, also face a deadline. They have limited time to enjoy the remaining days of college life.
A study by the psychologist Jaime Kurtz
looked at how seniors managed this deadline. She started the study six weeks from graduation. Six weeks is far enough away that the end of college may not yet have fully registered, yet it is short enough that it can be made to feel quite close. For half the students, Kurtz framed the deadline as imminent (only so many hours left) and for the others she framed it as far off (a portion of the year left). The change in perceived scarcity changed how students managed their time. When they felt they had little time left, they tried to get more out of every day. They spent more time engaging in activities, soaking in the last of their college years. They also reported being happier—presumably enjoying more of what college had to offer.

This impact of time scarcity has been observed in many disparate fields. In large-scale marketing experiments,
some customers are mailed a coupon
with an expiration date, while others are mailed a similar coupon that does not expire. Despite being valid for a longer period of time, the coupons with no expiration date are less likely to be used. Without the scarcity of time, the coupon does not draw focus and may even be forgotten. In another domain, organizational researchers find that
salespeople work hardest
in the last weeks (or days) of a sales cycle. In one study we ran, we found that data-entry workers worked harder
as payday got closer
.

The British journalist Max Hastings, in his book on Churchill, notes, “
An Englishman’s mind works best
when it is almost too late.” Everyone who has ever worked on a deadline may feel like an Englishman. Deadlines are effective precisely because they create
scarcity and focus the mind. Just as hunger led food to be top of mind for the men in the World War II starvation study, a deadline leads the current task to be top of mind. Whether it is the few minutes left in a meeting or a few weeks left in college, the deadline looms large. We put more time into the task. Distractions are less tempting. You do not linger at lunch when the chapter is due soon, you do not waste time on tangents when the meeting is about to end, and you focus on getting the most out of college just before graduating. When time is short, you get more out of it, be it work or pleasure. We call this the
focus dividend
—the positive outcome of scarcity capturing the mind.

Scarcity of any kind, not just time, should yield a focus dividend. We see this anecdotally. We are less liberal with the toothpaste as the tube starts to run empty. In a box of expensive chocolates, we savor (and hoard) the last ones. We run around on the last days of a vacation to see every sight. We write more carefully, and to our surprise often better, when we have a tight word limit.

Working with the psychologist Anuj Shah, we had an insight about how to take advantage of the breadth of these implications to test our theory. If our theory applies to all kinds of scarcity—not just money or time—it should also apply to scarcity produced artificially. Does scarcity created in the lab also produce a focus dividend? The lab allows us to study how people behave under conditions that are more controlled than the world typically allows, revealing mechanisms of thought and action. This follows a long tradition in psychological research of using the lab to study important social issues—conformity, obedience, strategic interaction, helping behavior, and even crime.

To do this, we created
a video game based on Angry Birds
for our research. In this variant, which we called Angry Blueberries, players shoot blueberries at waffles using a virtual slingshot, deciding
how far back to pull the sling and at what angle. The blueberries fly across the screen, caroming off objects and “destroying” all the waffles they hit. It is a game of aim, precision, and physics. You must guess the trajectories and estimate how the blueberries will bounce.

In the study, subjects played twenty rounds, earning points that translated to prizes. In each new round they received another set of blueberries. They could shoot all the blueberries they had or they could bank some for use in future rounds. If they ended the twenty rounds with blueberries saved up, they could play more rounds and continue accumulating points as long as they had blueberries left. In this game, blueberries determined one’s wealth. More blueberries meant more shots, which meant more points and a better prize. The next step was to create blueberry scarcity. We made some subjects blueberry rich (they were given six blueberries per round) and others blueberry poor (given only three per round).

So how did they do? Of course, the rich scored more points because they had more blueberries to shoot with. But looked at another way, the poor did better: they were more accurate with their shots. This was not because of some magical improvement in visual acuity. The poor took more time on each shot. (There was no limit on how long they could take.) They aimed more carefully. They had fewer shots, so they were more judicious. The rich, on the other hand, just let the blueberries fly. It is not that the rich, simply because they had more rounds, got bored and decided to spend less time on the task. Nor is it that they became fatigued. Even on the first shots they were already less focused and less careful than the poor. This matches our prediction. Having fewer blueberries, the blueberry poor enjoyed a focus dividend.

In a way it is surprising that blueberry scarcity had effects similar to those observed with deadlines—time scarcity. Having few blueberries in a video game bears little resemblance to having only a few minutes left in a meeting or only a few hours to finish a project. Focusing on each shot, how far back to pull the sling, and when to release bears little resemblance to the complex choices that determine
conversation and pace at work. We had stripped the world of all its complexity, all except for scarcity, and yet the same behavior emerged. These initial blueberry results illustrate how—whatever else may happen in the world—scarcity by itself can create a focus dividend.