Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Top positive review

Insightful and practical.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 24, 2022

Love this book. On par with Thinking, Fast and Slow and essential reading for anyone who wants more ways to navigate having too little time / attention / money.

Top critical review

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David E. Giles

One Star

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 15, 2015

Very disappointing.

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686 total ratings, 152 with reviews

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From Canada

Amazon Customer

Insightful and practical.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 24, 2022

Verified Purchase

Love this book. On par with Thinking, Fast and Slow and essential reading for anyone who wants more ways to navigate having too little time / attention / money.

Helpful

Deanna Cottell

Interesting perspective

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 15, 2021

Verified Purchase

This book is very helpful at reframing how scarcity affects the human psyche and behaviour. Very enlightening!

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barbara hicks

Great

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 9, 2020

Good Book.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

Excellent analysis of the mindset of scarcity. Helps me better understand our adult literacy students, many of whom live in poverty. I frequently recommend the book to our volunteer tutors.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Tim in Winnipeg

Excellent book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 9, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book helped me understand poverty in a different way and it helped me understand my own scarcity of time. Highly recommend it!

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Rod J McIntyre

A must read for anyone dealing with people "short of resources - money ".

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 7, 2014

Verified Purchase

Amazing book.

One person found this helpful

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From other countries

Burge

An upgrade to behavioural economics

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 13, 2023

Verified Purchase

This is a great book and it walks you through a relatively new field - Scarcity. Learning how and why we make decisions that on the surface appear foolish or irrational is fundamental to changing your own behaviour and to designing better products and services for customers that also struggle with these human frailties.

Clive Hallam

Not scarce on useful insight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 23, 2022

Verified Purchase

If you want to understand why people think and do the things they do, this is for you. It provides a great insight into how being scarce of resources, be it time, money or motivation, adversely affect our ability to make decisions, impacts our life choices and, as importantly, the lives of those around us.
Well worth a read.

One person found this helpful

Steven Stam

Ecomic Study on Human Behavior

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 12, 2014

Verified Purchase

In Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir explore the implications of scarcity, a condition that occurs when you have less than you feel you need. Scarcity comes in all shapes and sizes—we see it in money, sleep, work, packing, time with our kids, addictions to email and social media—no matter what the item, people are constantly battling between conditions of abundance and scarcity. For example, when college students are assigned a term paper a month before it is due, few rush out and get to work, yet at the last minute they become frantic and paper obsessed. Gone are the wasted moments brought on by procrastination, in is the condition of tunneling where every second counts, where the worker suddenly appears dissatisfied, where there cognitive ability (bandwidth) is taxed either for the benefit of the paper and the detriment of all else or perhaps for collective detriment in general.

While the text has a slightly academic tilt at first, as it progresses Mullainathan and Shafir take a Freakencomics twist and creatively explore the world of scarcity. Whether it is the effects of being paid once a year on sugar cane farmers or the consequences of checking your email prior to starting on an unrelated project, the authors explore the unexpected consequences of scarcity. In terms of the former, an annual payment requires the farmer to budget an entire year from harvest point on, something that becomes increasingly taxing as their funds become scarce while checking that email before your child’s bath or personal writing time deteriorates said quality time for even if you don’t respond, your mind becomes taxed by the bandwidth required to ignore the email. In each instance, Mullainathan and Shafir explore situations in a way that moves beyond common sense and in an effort to find novel solutions to eliminate scarcity traps in favor of creating a productive, driven situation. Further, they dive into why, when given the opportunity to create a buffer from said scarcity, people often find themselves in the very same traps as before.

5 people found this helpful

Zoe Chance

One of my favorite books of all time

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 15, 2020

Verified Purchase

I devoured this book when it came out, and when I wanted to go back to my notes and highlights, I had to read the whole book again because I had highlighted so much of it. I'm now on my third time through, and somehow it keeps getting better. The topic is fascinating (at least to me!), the writing is tight and pulls you along, and the research is solid and engaging. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir are star academics who use their giant brains and their sweat to make the world a better place--and they are.

The investigation of scarcity is more complex than you'd realize, and more interesting. Interesting that they draw compelling parallels between very different types of scarcity--money, time, food--and very different life situations--from poverty in the developing world to wealthy workaholics in the West, to teach you about the psychology of scarcity. It focuses a person's mind on what they haven't got. Which makes them able to do a few things more efficiently, but for the most part is a huge cognitive drain that makes it impossible to function at their best.

Everyone in public office, no, really everyone, should read this beautiful book.

4 people found this helpful

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