Sendhil Mullainathan

The work. The behavioral economics of poverty and scarcity, the resume audit study with Bertrand, and more recently machine learning as a tool for economic prediction and for auditing human decisions like bail.

The case for. He connects behavioral economics, discrimination, and AI in a way no one else does, and the scarcity work reframed how development economists think about the poor.

The case against. Kahneman, Thaler, and the 2019 development trio already collected much of the behavioral and poverty credit, and his output is spread across fields rather than concentrated in one.

The KmikeyM angle. Mullainathan argues scarcity taxes attention and bends decisions; KmikeyM outsourced his decisions to shareholders partly to get the bandwidth back.