Free Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Sharif Page B

saying “four” is quite hard. It is hard for the same reason that it is hard to quickly hit the opposite side each time you see the flower.
    Using these tasks, we found that farmers performed much worse before harvest than after harvest. The same farmer fared worse on fluid intelligence and executive control when he was poor (preharvest) than when he was rich (postharvest). Much like the subjects at the mall, the same person looked less intelligent and more impulsive when he was poor. Yet in this case it was not us who triggered scarcity-related thoughts or even tried to bring them to the surface. These thoughts were there naturally when the farmers were poor (the harvest money dissipated to a small amount) but not when they were rich (still flush with cash from the harvest).
    And again the magnitudes were large. The postharvest farmers got about 25 percent more items correct on Raven’s. Put in IQ terms, as in the earlier mall study, this would correspond to about 9 or 10 IQ points. Not as big a gap as at the mall, but that is to be expected. After all, here we hadn’t induced them to think about money. We simply measured their mental state at an arbitrarily selected point in time, their
latent
tendency to have their bandwidth taxed by scarcity. On the executive control task , they were 11 percent slower in responding and made 15 percent more errors while poor, quite comparable to the mall study. Had we met a farmer when he was poor, we would have been tempted to attribute his limited capacity to a personal trait. But we know from our study that his limitation haslittle to do with his genuine capacity as a person. The very state of having less money in the months before harvest had made him perform less intelligently and show less cognitive control.
    Before notching this as a victory for our theory, however, a few doors must be shut. We know that scarcity (poverty) changes before and after harvest. But are there other things that change with it? And if so, might these be the drivers of the psychic changes? Three alternatives stand out.
    First, if the farmers are poorer preharvest, might they also be eating less? If so, would it be such a surprise then to find that their cognitive function was also lower? Worse nutrition and simple hunger could leave anyone’s brain in a weakened state. For our farmers, though, this was not the case. These farmers are not so poor when they are short on cash that they are forced to cut back on food. If anything, they spent slightly less money on food postharvest. Although we find that they spend less preharvest, they do not spend less on food. Instead, they spend less on other things that matter. For example, they might give a cousin a smaller gift for his wedding. In a culture like India’s, where gift giving is not simply a bonus but an obligation (a repayment of past gifts), such cutbacks can be painful.
    Second, might they not be working harder preharvest? Preparing for harvest is hard work and might leave farmers tired. Physical exhaustion could easily bring mental exhaustion. In fact, our surveys sufficiently preceded the actual harvest date (four weeks is a long time in agriculture) that preparation for harvest had not started in any serious way. Farmers were not working any more or harder in the preharvest week than in the postharvest week.
    Finally, harvest time is not only when you get your money; it’s also when you find out how much you got. Farming is notoriously variable. Some harvests are bountiful, others meager. Could the simple anxiety of not knowing what he will earn affect the farmer’s mental state? For some crops, such as rice, this is a serious concern. But not so with sugar cane. By surveying his land, a farmer can readily estimate his income. Almost all the crop growth has happened several months before harvest. The last months are just to increase the sugarcontent of the crop, not its volume. But this is the mill’s problem: the farmers get paid solely on