Sendhil Mullainathan

“If you have urgent current expenses to cover, then future priorities like college and retirement fall off your radar because they are simply less pressing. Scarcity of attention prevents us from seeing what's really important. The psychology of scarcity engrosses us in only our present needs.”

“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.”

“Things that price at $4.99 sell very differently than things that price at $5.”

“Some struggle with medical issues - like insomnia - that make sleep hard. But for many of us, the quantity and quality of sleep come down to a matter of choice. Still, only a few enterprising economists have looked closely at this, and generally, those have assumed that we choose our hours of sleep optimally.”

“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.”

“If you go and stop people at a supermarket and ask them for their receipt and say, 'Hey how much did you just spend?' middle class shoppers have no idea. The poor know what they just spent.”

“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.”

“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 will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it's touted as some big solution.”

“Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity.”

“The ability to save automatically is among the most powerful tools available to us.”

“If someone who is poor says, 'I may not have much money, but for me, what's really important is to have a good television so my family can enjoy and watch,' we should be a little careful and recognize that just like we all have individual liberty to make the choices we want, that we not judge too much on that.”

“I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“It's 2014, and women are still paid less than men. Does this suggest that a gender pay gap is an unfortunately permanent fixture? Will it still be with us in 50 years? I would predict yes. But by that point, it will be men who will be earning less than women.”

“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.”