Human Systems and Behavior

Exploring how companies exploit envy to create perpetual consumer demand through social comparison and status signaling.

Explore how digital abundance creates new forms of scarcity, depleting our cognitive bandwidth and creating modern attention famines.

Discover how abundance provides 'slack' that enables better decision-making and why the poor often make wiser economic choices.

Explore how scarcity creates self-perpetuating cycles of debt and poor decisions, making escape difficult despite best intentions.

Discover how resource constraints reduce cognitive capacity, causing measurable declines in intelligence and decision-making ability.

How perception of resources shapes economic behavior from hunter-gatherers to digital abundance. We are the only species that creates artificial scarcity in an age of abundance.

Discover how scarcity creates powerful focus but dangerous tunnel vision, fundamentally changing how we think and make decisions.

How do organizations decay? This series explores the fundamental laws that govern how organizations grow, shrink, and evolve over time.