Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes

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.

Our soft hearts are what tell us that, whatever the circumstances of birth, everyone must be given opportunities to do well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

It’s hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

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.

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.

Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, ‘This is a good ad campaign.’ So, there is a little bit of slippage there. That’s just a caveat. That’s different from actually having an effective ad campaign.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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

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.

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.