Sendhil Mullainathan on poverty

Excerpt from MIT's Spectrum magazine

“I grew up in India and thus had a personal connection to the subject of poverty,” Mullainathan says. That motivated him to find out “why poor people are poor, and the more I looked into it, the more I recognized that the circumstances of poverty create their own unique psychologies.” These can extend far beyond the lack of money, he explains, as poverty casts what he calls a “mental footprint” that can affect practically every facet of life. Lack of sound nutrition and sleep, for instance, can impair one’s cognitive abilities, leading to poor decision-making and poor parenting—factors that can make poverty self-perpetuating. Mullainathan presented these ideas in a 2013 book, Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much (Times Books), written with psychologist Eldar Shafir.