'Scarcity Mindset'

choi

(1) The psychology of scarcity | Days Late, Dollars Short; Those with too little have a lot on their mind. Economist, Aug 31, 2013.
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... -late-dollars-short
(book review on Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity; Why having too little means so much. Times Books, 2013)

Quote: "This [scarcity]  mindset brings two benefits. It concentrates the mind on pressing needs. It also gives people a keener sense of the value of a dollar, minute, calorie or smile. * * * Likewise, the poor have a better grasp of costs. This scarcity mindset can also be debilitating. * * * By making people slower witted and weaker willed, scarcity creates a mindset that perpetuates scarcity, the authors argue.

My comment:
(a) I'd like to see their evidences, and whether character flaws are cause or effect of poverty ("if these so-called character flaws are a consequence of poverty, and not just a cause of it").
(b) "The authors discuss a range of solutions to the psychological pratfalls of scarcity."

pratfall (n; argot prat buttocks + fall; First Known Use: 1930):
"a fall on the buttocks"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pratfall

choi

(2) Jacob Goldstein, The Crazy Cash-Giveaway Experiment. Is it nuts to give the world's poorest people money without conditions? Or just good economics. New York Times Magazine, Aug 18, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/1 ... rings-attached.html

Quote: " 'You give people cash to start a business or expand their business, and in a lot of cases, they shoot forward,' [Columbia University assistant professor in political science Chris] Blattman says. 'Then they start screeching to a halt when they hit the next constraint.' If [the Kenyan Bernard] Omondi wanted to further expand, he’d probably find it hard to get a small-business loan from a bank. The problems holding Omondi and his neighbors back — underdeveloped financial systems, bad infrastructure — are the generic but defining problems of the developing world, and they won’t be fixed by a one-time windfall.

Note:
(a) "Bernard Omondi lives in a small Kenyan village in a rural district called Siaya"

Siaya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siaya
(a town in Siaya County)
(b) "An outside group is studying GiveDirectly’s impact; final results are expected later this year."

GiveDirectly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveDirectly
(headquarters Manhattan; Michael Faye (Chairman of the Board); "founded [in 2008] by a team led by Paul Niehaus, then in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Niehaus is now an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, in addition to being the unpaid CEO of GiveDirectly")