Eco 315 - Chapter of the Bandwidth Tax

ECO 315

Homework #3

        What stood out to me in on the Chapter of the Bandwidth tax was that we experience the consequences of scarcity of catching our attention in our everyday lives. Just like in the example in the chapter this is the hypothesis “because the focus on scarcity is involuntary, and because it captures our attention, it impedes our ability to focus on other things.” (The Bandwidth Tax, pg. 41) Although it may not show the type of scarcity that people in poverty deal with, through experiments we are able to find out the impulses of people in poverty. This leads us to understand the mind and that with a little bit of scarcity in the mind it can block our executive control and lose ability to pay attention, make bad decisions and fall to temptations.

        What Myers explains about transformational development is that people need to find their identity and create those harmonious relationships through God. I believe in doing this, it will help in giving people in poverty more cognitive capacity where they can use the bandwidth in them to make decisions that they normally wouldn’t make with a large cognitive load. God plays an important role in our lives and if we as Christians can preach his word to those who are less fortunate we could impact their lives in a greater way.

        The development theorist that interested me the most were Banerjee and Duflo because of their theory about research within a select number of poor communities where they can truly figure out how people in poverty act the way they do. “To progress, we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.” (39) Unlike the other development theorist, Banerjee and Duflo want to find the underlying reason to poverty by going into more research. While others just simply see poverty from the outside view and would like to just throw foreign aid blindly in a sense.