The importance of (mental) bandwidth

Christine has reviewed Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much:

To put it simply, one must have a lot of bandwidth and little-to-no financial scarcity to think about saving for college or retirement. The peace-of-mind expendable income brings allows a person to think about and build up rainy-day savings. The poor are too busy putting out budgetary fires to think about retirement. They have too little bandwidth, or “slack,” in their minds and their budgets to entertain such a long-term idea. They are worrying about rent and car repairs. Their tunnel-focus on those immediate costs render the poor unable to look far ahead or plan for the future. Anything that lies “outside the tunnel,” as the authors say, gets ignored.

This, coupled with what I’ve already heard about the book, makes it sound like a compelling read. I’ll be grabbing a copy.