One of many things that self has not done much lately is to have a look at The New York Review of Books, even though it's on my blogroll. To remedy that deficiency, I visited the page this week, where, of course, numerous interesting articles awaited, not all of which that are readily available I've read yet (lazy loser, that 3CM). NYRB articles are generally well-thought out and tackle issues in depth, which means of course that the vast majority of 'Amurrikans' will never even come closing to thinking about reading the NYRB. One particular article, specifically a review by Cass Sunstein of the new book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, is the starting point for this SNLC. Interestingly, there's a curious and unintended (? maybe not so unintended) connection between this review and another article in the same issue, on, of all things, the I-P conflict. More below the flip.....
First, Sunstein summarizes Mullainathan's and Shafir's thesis in this "soundbite" about the destructive meta-effects of scarcity:
"[Scarcity] puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see. It depletes their self-control. It makes them more impulsive and sometimes a bit dumb. What we often consider a part of people’s basic character - an inability to learn, a propensity to anger or impatience - may well be a product of their feeling of scarcity. If any of us were similarly situated, we might end up with a character a lot like theirs. An insidious problem is that scarcity produces more scarcity. It creates its own trap."
One other meta-effect that hits closer to home is in the next paragraph:
"The cash-poor and the time-poor have much in common with lonely people, for whom relationships with others are scarce. When people struggle with scarcity, their minds are intensely occupied, even taken over, by what they lack."
Reading this passage put me back in mind to a
this 2006 NYT article about the Swedish-born soprano Erika Sunnegårdh, where at one point, she's quoted:
"Without technical assurance, Ms. Sunnegardh lacked confidence. 'Vocal technique is like money or sex,' she explained. 'If you don't have it, it's all you think about.'"
Yup, 3CM resembles one part of that assessment all too well. No prizes for guessing which. (BTW, Ms.Sunnegårdh seems to have done reasonably OK for herself since her 15 minutes of fame at that 2006 high-stress Met Opera broadcast appearance, if her schedule of concert appearances from her website is anything to go by.)
That aside, the connection of this idea of scarcity is to this I-P themed commentary by Peter Beinart. Beinart's thesis, radically oversimplified, is that American Jews, by and large and with extremely few exceptions, don't try to reach out to understand the Palestinean perspective, don't want to try, and are not encouraged to try:
"I used to try, clumsily, to answer the assertions about Palestinians that so often consume the American Jewish conversation about Israel. But increasingly I give a terser reply: 'Ask them.' That usually ends the conversation because in mainstream American Jewish circles, asking Palestinians to respond to the endless assertions that American Jews make about them is extremely rare.....
.....the organized American Jewish community [is] a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives."
You see the "scarcity" issue here. But it goes beyond a lack of information:
"If one consequence of this isolation from Palestinians is a lack of information, the other is a lack of empathy. Because most American Jewish leaders have never seen someone denied the right to visit a family member because they lack the right permit, or visited a military court, or seen a Palestinian village scheduled for demolition because it lacks building permits that are almost impossible for Palestinians to get, it is easy for them to minimize the human toll of living, for forty-six years, without the basic rights that your Jewish neighbors take for granted."
Remember Sunstein's statement before about how scarcity can make people do dumb things. The much simpler term for scarcity of information, especially with respect to the major topic of Beinart's article, is ignorance. This applies to the big political picture as well as the smaller individual sphere. Contrast this with those who don't suffer at least economic scarcity (as opposed to intellectual scarcity), as Sunstein pithily states:
"Those who live in circumstances of abundance have a kind of cushion, which allows them to avoid depletion. If wealthy people are confronted with a serious economic 'shock,' requiring them to spend a great deal of cash on an emergency, their lives are not turned upside-down. With respect to money itself, this point is self-evident, but Mullainathan and Shafir want to draw attention to its psychological and behavioral consequences. When bad surprises occur, those who live under circumstances of abundance (with respect to money or time) do not have to devote a lot of mental energy to them."
In the end, Sunstein hedges, to avoid obvious oversimplification, at the end about scarcity not-necessarily being an all-encompassing cause of the "tunneling" phenomenon that the resource-deficient among us will have occasion to experience:
"In their account, scarcity leads to particular psychological states, which have behavioral consequences. There is a lot of truth in this account, but I think that it might benefit from greater nuance. Scarcity, as such, is not necessary for those psychological states to occur, and in some cases, it is not sufficient.......
Is scarcity sufficient to produce a form of tunneling? In cases of real desperation, as with extreme thirst or hunger, it almost certainly is. But some forms of scarcity do not have that effect. The psychological consequences that concern Mullainathan and Shafir need not occur merely because people are poor or busy, or because they have few friends. Unless they are at the very edge of subsistence, people without much money are able to think about a wide range of things; their minds need not be occupied by their economic status. So too, people who are single, or who have few friends, need not be preoccupied by that fact. Some people are doing fine on their own. The association between scarcity, taken as a matter of fact, and 'tunneling' varies greatly across people and situations."
Also, some of the 'cures' that Sunstein, by way of Mullainathan and Shafir, to address the "cockpit design errors", can easily be caricatured by the other side as "nanny state" measures, even if many people do smaller-scale automatic measures on their own, like direct electronic billing from their bank accounts. And granted, it may seem like plain common sense that limited options and resources obviously puts constraints on actions in case of stress or emergency. But it bears remembering that common sense is often not all that common. Plus, if nothing else, this is all a reminder of what a nice source of food for thought the
NYRB can be, for those willing to seek it out.
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol (on a night with unbelievably mild weather here), namely your loser stories of the week. Although in terms of weather.....