Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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, but people tend to say they'll use it in a few weeks' time and then they don't do it.”

“It is safe to say that when people are short on cash, they might be less productive at work, be worse parents, and have less self-control.”

“Our soft hearts are what tell us that, whatever the circumstances of birth, everyone must be given opportunities to do well.”

“Eat better or work out more, and you'll see the benefits weeks, months or years down the road. Sleep more, and you'll see the benefits tomorrow.”

“Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity.”

“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.”

“The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.”

“Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task - say, solving math problems - men are more willing to enter competitions based on that task. Men also show less risk aversion.”

“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 and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.”

“If women's choices - such as taking time off to rear children - make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys' behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?”