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" Now imagine that we offer you a highly subsidized daycare program. What exactly are you getting for it? Surely, we are saving you time shuttling your kids back and forth. We might be saving you money as well...But we would be giving you something else, even more precious. Something you could spend on many things. We would be giving you back all that mental bandwidth that you currently use to fret, worry, and juggle these arrangements. We'd be taking a cognitive load off. As we've seen, this would help your executive control, your self-control more broadly, even your parenting. It would increase your general cognitive capacity, your ability to focus, the quality of your work, or whatever else you chose to turn your mind to. From this perspective, help with child care is much more than that. It is a way to build human capital of the deepest kind: it creates bandwidth. "

Sendhil Mullainathan , Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much


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Sendhil Mullainathan quote : Now imagine that we offer you a highly subsidized daycare program. What exactly are you getting for it? Surely, we are saving you time shuttling your kids back and forth. We might be saving you money as well...But we would be giving you something else, even more precious. Something you could spend on many things. We would be giving you back all that mental bandwidth that you currently use to fret, worry, and juggle these arrangements. We'd be taking a cognitive load off. As we've seen, this would help your executive control, your self-control more broadly, even your parenting. It would increase your general cognitive capacity, your ability to focus, the quality of your work, or whatever else you chose to turn your mind to. From this perspective, help with child care is much more than that. It is a way to build human capital of the deepest kind: it creates bandwidth.