In this week's episode, I continue my conversation with my University of Chicago colleague,

Sindel Mullinatsen, an economist-data scientist and a Arthur Genius Award winner,

with remarkable talent both for generating ideas and explaining those ideas in a way that

anyone can understand. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire, with Steve Levitt.

Sindel has so many interests that in the first half of our conversation that's last week's

podcast episode, I didn't even manage to get to the topics he's thought about most.

So if you missed last week's episode, no worries. The order of the two episodes doesn't matter.

But in this week's episode, I pick up in the middle of our conversation with me telling

Sindel about my first reaction to hearing that he had written a book entitled Scarcity.

One of the things I found so unbelievable about that book is that I saw the title and it's called

Scarcity and I thought to myself, this is so arrogant because economics is the study of scarcity

and for the last 20 years we've all been studying scarcity. So who does Sindel think he is

that he's going to have something new to say? And I read the book and I'm like, wow,

Sindel had something new to say. So first tell us what you had new to say and then I think

bring it home with the experiments. So economists study the physical fact of scarcity.

You know, everything is scarce. You buy something, you're not buying something else,

there's no constraint. What we are studying here is the psychology of scarcity, the feeling of

having too little and the hypothesis is that when you have too little of something that tends to

capture your attention, your mind automatically goes towards it. When you're very busy,

your mind goes towards the things taking up your time and the deadlines, the things that are

dueed for the poor who are scarce in money, their mind automatically goes towards, oh my god,

will I be able to make rent? And for me the most satisfying thing about the book, it's the

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