Michael Easter on Excess, Moderation, and the Scarcity Brain

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2023

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Slot machines, social media, and potato chips: we humans seem to find a lot of things hard to consume in moderation. Why does "enough" seem so much harder to say than "more?" Listen as Michael Easter discusses these questions and his book, The Scarcity Brain, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Easter shares ways that our awareness of how our brain works can help us reclaim balance--in our diets, our money, our emotions, and how we spend our time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics
0:07.0	and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:13.0	Institution.
0:14.0	Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
0:18.6	the information related to today's conversation.
0:21.6	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.8	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org, we'd love to hear from you.
0:37.8	Today is October 9th, 2023, and my guest is author Michael Easter.
0:42.0	This is Michael's second appearance on econtalk, first here in July of 2021, discussing
0:47.8	his book, The Comfort Crisis, our topic for today is his new book, The Scarcity Brain,
0:54.7	Picture Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough.
0:59.7	Michael, welcome back to econtalk.
1:01.7	Thanks for having me back, Russ.
1:03.7	What is The Scarcity Brain?
1:06.7	It's this feeling that we can't get enough.
1:09.7	You know, everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation, and the question is, well,
1:13.7	why are we also bad at moderating?
1:15.7	So the book sort of investigates the roots of that and spends a lot of time looking today,
1:21.7	looking specifically at how today technology has really allowed corporations, different entities
1:29.7	to figure out what gets us to not moderate and push us into more.
1:37.7	And this is a topic we've touched on many, many times here in the program.
	...

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