Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
These authors discuss how scarcity of money, time, friends, etc, affects people cognitively.
Gives a new way of thinking about "why the poor stay poor" and why busy people can't slow down - why lonely people have a hard time making friends.
I copied this from a review on Goodreads:
"Are the poor to blame for their poverty? For their flawed choices?
Are the overweight, struggling with a diet? What about those who complain of being too busy? What about the lonely?
What these have in common is scarcity, something that economists have always studied. But until fairly recently, the idea of studying cognition, or feelings, from an economic perspective would have been absurd, or even heretical. The field of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics has changed that, and took off like a rocket when Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
What Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir focus on is how our minds function when it perceives scarcity — or, at least partially, becomes dysfunctional. The term is "scarcity trap", and the basic idea is that our brains so tightly focus on what is so desperately lacking that thinking about something else becomes tremendously difficult."