If you've found yourself getting caught up in the conversations about poverty and inequality spurred by the Baltimore demonstrations and riots, you should read this Harvard Magazine profile of the work of Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist there who studies the effects of scarcity on human decision-making.
Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, a Princeton psychologist, are the co-authors of the excellent book Scarcity (which I reviewed back when it came out), and the Harvard piece, written by Cara Feinberg, does a really nice job summing up a lot of their research. Its basic thrust is that when we feel like we don't have enough of something — money or time or affection or anything else — it affects our ability to make wise decisions and saps our cognitive capabilities in general. Rich people and poor people are both affected by this; the difference is that poor people face scarcity more often and have less of a margin for error in navigating it.
[For more of this story, written by Jesse Singal, go to http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2...s-to-your-brain.html]
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