Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20004-3027
T 202/691-4000
Distracted Into Debt
THE SOURCE: “Some Consequences of Having Too Little” by Anuj K. Shah, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir, in Science, Nov. 2, 2012.
Why do poor people so often waste money and pile up debt? For years, social scientists have blamed environmental factors and personality traits unique to the poor. But Anuj K. Shah, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology at Princeton, say something both more innate and more universal is at work.
Call it the tunnel vision of scarcity. When funds are low, all humans—not just the poor—focus much more intently on short-term demands. We put so much cognitive energy into immediate concerns that there is little left for long-term considerations. The same dynamic prevails in other domains: People short of time or hungry for food also have short time horizons.
To read the rest of this article, please consider becoming a WQ subscriber, which allows online access to the current WQ issue as well as archive content. Other access options are below.
Research, browse, and discover more than 35 years of articles, essays, and reviews by preeminent scholars and writers. Our searchable archive of back issues is free for WQ subscribers.
 |
 |
 |
Subscribe today
to the WQ Online
and receive immediate access
to the WQ archive for a full year.
Subscribe Now
Nanny Academies
THE SOURCE: “The Few, the Proud, the Infantilized” by Bruce Fleming, in The Chronicle Review, Oct. 8, 2012.Debating America’s Pivot
THE SOURCES: “The Problem With the Pivot” by Robert S. Ross, in Foreign Affairs, Nov.–Dec. 2012; “The Turn Away From Europe” by Josef Joffe, in Commentary, Nov. 2012; and “Asia’s New Age of Instability” by Michael Wesley, in The National Interest, Nov.–Dec. 2012.The Surge Goes Awry
THE SOURCE: “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, Again” by Frances Z. Brown, in The American Interest, Nov.–Dec. 2012.