Sendhil Mullainathan

"Abundance gives us the luxury of making mistakes."

"Scarcity forces specialization of thought."

"The mind cannot escape the pull of scarcity."

"We judge the poor by standards we could only meet if we were rich."

"Poverty is an attention economy problem."

"Decision fatigue hits the poor first and hardest."

"Scarcity creates its own urgency that crowds out everything else."

"The real cost of poverty is opportunity cost."

"We cannot think our way out of situations that are not thinking problems."

"Bandwidth is what turns a challenge into a crisis."

"The poor have less room for error because error is expensive."

"Scarcity is an intellectual handicap."

"We must design for scarcity, not hope for abundance."

"When resources are thin, relationships become transactional."

"The mind working under scarcity is fundamentally different."

"Poverty is not inevitable, but it requires intention to escape."

"Bandwidth is the hidden curriculum."

"Scarcity is not just an economic problem, it's a cognitive one."

"The cost of being poor includes the cost of thinking."

"We underestimate how much our circumstances determine our capabilities."

"Attention poverty is worse than income poverty."

"Scarcity creates a kind of cognitive debt."

"The poor are not stupid, they are distracted."

"When your mind is occupied by scarcity, innovation becomes impossible."

"Poverty forces prioritization at the expense of everything else."

"The bandwidth tax extracts a real cognitive price."

"We need to change systems, not just change minds."

"Scarcity is self-perpetuating without external intervention."

"The psychology of scarcity is universal."

"Financial stress creates cognitive stress which creates more financial stress."