Quotes by Sendhil Mullainathan

About Sendhil Mullainathan:

Sendhil Mullainathan is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (with Eldar Shafir). He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. He is co-founder of ideas42, a non-profit organization that uses behavioral science to help solve social problems, and the MIT Poverty Action Lab. He has made extensive academic contributions with the including the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), and has also worked in government with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

If you send out one coupon with a deadline of a week and another that must be used within the next month, you end up having more redemptions with the one week deadline. It's really amazing. With the month deadline you have four times as much time, bu...

Sendhil Mullainathan

We ought to arrange calendars as we arrange art on our walls and ask: how does this task fit next to the surrounding ones?

Sendhil Mullainathan

Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the govern...

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 ch...

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 t...

Sendhil Mullainathan

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities...

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

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

Serial tasking is hard because switching tasks is hard, even when the tasks are easy and similar. In some experiments, bilingual speakers are asked to read out numbers, first in one language and then midway in another language. They often stumble at ...

Sendhil Mullainathan

As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firm...

Sendhil Mullainathan

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

Sendhil Mullainathan

A few drugs - such as beta-blockers, statins and glycogen control medications - have proved very effective at managing hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. Most insurance plans charge something for them. Why not make drugs like these fr...

Sendhil Mullainathan

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

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

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

Web searching and cellphone use both flourish in the wee hours. Before the dawn of the web, I would stay up watching television. But there is something soporific about television: I would often nod off. Not so when I'm online. As technologies expand,...

Sendhil Mullainathan

Organizations talk about spending their lives firefighting - dealing with the next problem without having the bandwidth to deal with what is down the pipeline. I think most of the poor have that problem.

Sendhil Mullainathan

If you go and stop people at a supermarket and ask them for their receipt and say, 'Hey how much did you just spend?' middle class shoppers have no idea. The poor know what they just spent.

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

Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.

Sendhil Mullainathan

Author Bio

  • NameSendhil Mullainathan
  • DescriptionIndian economist
  • CountryIndia
  • ProfessionEconomist
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program