Words matter. These are the best Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn’t do is really focus on the fact that ‘I want this person to like me.’ That’s going to make you very uninteresting. But the lonely, they just can’t help but focus on that.
We should try to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to find a great life. It’s a quest that will require political will and ingenious policies. President Obama’s proposed expansion of the earned-income tax credit goes in this direction, but we need more.
The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. ‘Big data’ is terrific, but it’s usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.
Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs – a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don’t want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.
The amount of resources we put in are disparate. We put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies. How much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible, systematic, testing way?
Eat better or work out more, and you’ll see the benefits weeks, months or years down the road. Sleep more, and you’ll see the benefits tomorrow.
No one would say, ‘Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.’ We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? ‘Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let’s put it out there.’
The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you’ll have little in the future.
You can get pictures into what people are sort of thinking about others. Just go onto Google and type ‘Why are Indians’ and then look for the autocomplete.
People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don’t know. We don’t know the prices of things. But gasoline, even when you’re not buying, it’s staring you in the face. Psychologists call this ‘salience.’
Web searching and cellphone use both flourish in the wee hours. Before the dawn of the web, I would stay up watching television. But there is something soporific about television: I would often nod off. Not so when I’m online. As technologies expand, these problems may only worsen.
Our outrage at inequality is primal. But primal emotions are not always noble ones. Of course, when I see a colleague receive some award, I covet it. But this is not me at my best, and these are not the feelings we would instill and promote in our children.
As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you’re very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in.
You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can’t take a break from being poor. You can’t say, ‘Hey I’ve had enough of worrying about money, I’m just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I’ve recovered.’
Organizations talk about spending their lives firefighting – dealing with the next problem without having the bandwidth to deal with what is down the pipeline. I think most of the poor have that problem.
Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is ‘scarcity,’ and anyone who has the experience of ‘having very little’ experiences the same psychology.
For somebody for whom they’re going to buy a certain amount of gas irrespective of the price, should they really spend so much time thinking about the price of gas? It doesn’t affect anything they do.
January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year’s resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.
There’s a popular image of people who don’t save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.
Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to occupy our mental bandwidth. Although we can control where our time goes, we cannot fully control how our bandwidth is allocated.
Our soft hearts are what tell us that, whatever the circumstances of birth, everyone must be given opportunities to do well.
If women’s choices – such as taking time off to rear children – make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys’ behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?
Faced with a time shortage, we squeeze tasks into the nooks and crannies of our calendar, leaving less and less time to switch between them. As a result, we become less and less productive exactly when we need to be most productive.
Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task – say, solving math problems – men are more willing to enter competitions based on that task. Men also show less risk aversion.
The ability to save automatically is among the most powerful tools available to us.
