Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

The amount of resources we put in are disparate. We put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies. How much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible, systematic, testing way?

Sendhil Mullainathan

People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don’t know. We don’t know the prices of things. But gasoline, even when you‘re not buying, it’s staring you in the face. Psychologists call this ‘salience.’

Sendhil Mullainathan

The ability to save automatically is among the most powerful tools available to us.

Sendhil Mullainathan

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year’s resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Sendhil Mullainathan

You can get pictures into what people are sort of thinking about others. Just go onto Google and type ‘Why are Indians‘ and then look for the autocomplete.

Sendhil Mullainathan

It’s 2014, and women are still paid less than men. Does this suggest that a gender pay gap is an unfortunately permanent fixture? Will it still be with us in 50 years? I would predict yes. But by that point, it will be men who will be earning less than women.

Sendhil Mullainathan

It’s hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Our soft hearts are what tell us that, whatever the circumstances of birth, everyone must be given opportunities to do well.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Faced with a time shortage, we squeeze tasks into the nooks and crannies of our calendar, leaving less and less time to switch between them. As a result, we become less and less productive exactly when we need to be most productive.

Sendhil Mullainathan

There’s a popular image of people who don’t save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.

Sendhil Mullainathan

The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. ‘Big data’ is terrific, but it’s usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.

Sendhil Mullainathan

No one would say, ‘Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.’ We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? ‘Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let’s put it out there.’

Sendhil Mullainathan

One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn’t do is really focus on the fact that ‘I want this person to like me.’ That’s going to make you very uninteresting. But the lonely, they just can’t help but focus on that.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Eat better or work out more, and you’ll see the benefits weeks, months or years down the road. Sleep more, and you’ll see the benefits tomorrow.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Our outrage at inequality is primal. But primal emotions are not always noble ones. Of course, when I see a colleague receive some award, I covet it. But this is not me at my best, and these are not the feelings we would instill and promote in our children.

Sendhil Mullainathan

If someone who is poor says, ‘I may not have much money, but for me, what’s really important is to have a good television so my family can enjoy and watch,’ we should be a little careful and recognize that just like we all have individual liberty to make the choices we want, that we not judge too much on that.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to occupy our mental bandwidth. Although we can control where our time goes, we cannot fully control how our bandwidth is allocated.

Sendhil Mullainathan

We should try to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to find a great life. It’s a quest that will require political will and ingenious policies. President Obama‘s proposed expansion of the earned-income tax credit goes in this direction, but we need more.

Sendhil Mullainathan

People will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it’s touted as some big solution.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Things that price at $4.99 sell very differently than things that price at $5.

Sendhil Mullainathan

It is safe to say that when people are short on cash, they might be less productive at work, be worse parents, and have less self-control.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, ‘This is a good ad campaign.’ So, there is a little bit of slippage there. That’s just a caveat. That’s different from actually having an effective ad campaign.

Sendhil Mullainathan

If you have urgent current expenses to cover, then future priorities like college and retirement fall off your radar because they are simply less pressing. Scarcity of attention prevents us from seeing what’s really important. The psychology of scarcity engrosses us in only our present needs.

Sendhil Mullainathan

If women’s choices – such as taking time off to rear children – make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys’ behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?

Sendhil Mullainathan

The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you’ll have little in the future.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes

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