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This extremely important book takes a close and counter-intuitive look at how the brain behaves when confronted with the lack of something. That something is often money, but it can also be time, or will power, or human connection. In a nutshell, it explains how the brain's default method of creating immediate solutions to urgent problems can very often create a much larger problem down the road.

The reason for this is that urgent problems causes the brain to tunnel, which takes a tremendous amount of cognitive processing capacity. Focus on the immediate problem creates a "tax" on processing power that impairs the ability to step back and take a wider view of the situation; in particular, it causes us to underestimate the long-term costs of what may seem on the surface to be a good short-term solution.

This book is written in a fairly academic style and is somewhat repetitive in the first half. While it is not a self help book, it does contain critical information on how we can counteract mental habits that keep us in a scarcity loop. It also contains scores of real world examples of the bandwidth tax in action, from farmers in India to small business owners in the Caribbean to air traffic controllers in the Midwest. That latter group offered a particularly unique example of the bandwidth tax - on days when flights were backed up and they were required to manage a heavier load of airborne planes than normal, they demonstrated decreased ability to parent their children in a consistent fashion.

I originally assumed this would be an academically interesting book that would be most useful to those who develop aid programs. It is definitely that, as the authors address how many programs designed to help people get out of poverty fail because their structure contributes to a worsening of this bandwidth tax.

In reading it, however, I also saw more and more of myself in its pages. Though it took me weeks to finish it because I was trying to put out so many fires at work (the irony of it ending up overdue at the library was not lost on me) it gave me tremendous insight into how I had ended up so far behind and what I need to do to fix that. Thanks to Richard for encouraging me to bump it up my list.