How Scarcity Impacts Society, Gideon Vs. Wainwright, Banned Books Week, Teaching Emotional Intelligence

Air Date:
Heard On Central Time

Whether it’s time or money, we often don’t have enough of it. Rob Ferrett and Veronica Rueckert find out how scarcity affects us for the better and the worse. Then, we begin a WPR News series looking at the history of “Gideon versus Wainwright,” the Supreme Court case that resulted in public defenders for indigent defendants. We’ll also explore Banned Books Week and find out how teaching emotional intelligence can boost academic performance.

Featured in this Show

  • Scarcity Often Abundant, Researcher Says

    Many of us feel crunched for time and strapped for cash. For some, it might seem this scarcity of resources comes in a domino effect — one right after the other.

    There’s a reason for that, according to Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-author of “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.” He said one scarce resource underlies it all: Brain power.

    Likening the brain to a computer hard drive, Shafir said spending our energy focusing on a lack of time or money also means there’s not enough “bandwidth” left to invest in other areas of our lives.

    “The brain has different compartments. There’s the long-term memory, like the birthday dates and phone numbers you know. That’s mass capacity,” Shafir said. “But working memory — the part that you juggle in real time, the things you attend to — that’s very limited, much more than we appreciate.”

    Shafir said our brain has a tendency to focus on the things that are disturbing us, often causing us to lose sight of the periphery. This focus, which he calls “tunneling,” might lead to counterproductive behavior.

    For example, those who suffer from extreme loneliness are less likely to connect with others if they’re thinking about their loneliness.

    “At the very moment when they meet somebody, they focus less well. They stop responding well, they don’t engage well, they don’t tell jokes at the right moment, and they end up being less (socially) adequate than they would have been otherwise,” he said.

    Although people like to think that humans have control over our thoughts and behaviors, Shafir said they’re wrong. With the brain’s limited capacity for working memory, people are fooling themselves to think they can stretch its resources thin.

    “We think we could have no problem dividing our attention, but it turns out ‘multitasking’ is just another word for not paying attention,” he said.

  • Scarcity And How It Affects Us

    Running short on time or money can have similar effects on the way we think–and make it tougher to make good decisions. Our guest explains the impact of scarcity on our daily lives.

  • Banned Books Week

    It’s Banned Books Week, when the national book community comes together to celebrate the freedom of reading. A guest from the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom explains how Banned Books Week got started, and the author of a banned book explains the importance of the freedom to read.

  • Teaching Emotional Intelligence

    Ourt emotions are not out of our control Our guest teaches emotional intelligence to kids around the country, and says it’s a skill we can develop and learn.

Episode Credits

  • Rob Ferrett Host
  • Veronica Rueckert Host
  • Marc Brackett Guest
  • Eldar Shafir Guest
  • Deborah Caldwell Stone Guest
  • Peter Parnell Guest
  • Cynthia Schuster Producer
  • Amanda Magnus Producer

Related Stories