《破产姐妹》（2 Broke Girls）以纽约布鲁克林两个穷女招待（Max 与 Caroline）为缩影：她们想靠自制蛋糕创业，但关键瓶颈始终是启动资金规模不足，储蓄数额起伏不定、随时可能归零；因此无法换铺、招人、扩张、学习与优化管理，常在“最后一公里”被意外支出卷走。

穆来纳森（Sendhil Mullainathan）与沙菲尔（Eldar Shafir）的研究强调“稀缺俘获大脑”：资源稀缺会挤占“带宽”（认知能力与执行控制），让人陷入管窥与短期化。文中提到，穆来纳森 29 岁获麦克阿瑟奖；农民在收成后相对富裕时测试表现优于贫困期，显示贫困既是结果也会反过来制造能力受损。偏见也会放大差距：同样难题/易题表现混杂的“汉娜”，被告知出身中产者评价更宽容，被告知出身贫困者则更苛刻。

带宽被稀缺占据时，人们会忽视“不紧急但重要”的投入（如保险、农药等），从而加剧贫困；组织同样如此。例子是美国宇航局在 1998 年因英制与公制差异等低级失误，导致价值 1.25 亿美元的火星探测器项目失败。应对之道包括：个体用未来视角提升带宽与资源分配、设置更多安全阀；公共政策减少对穷人的刻板印象，在教育与起步机会等关键节点做倾斜，以小投入撬动大改观。

2 Broke Girls uses two broke waitresses in Brooklyn (Max and Caroline) to show a structural constraint: their startup rises and falls with a thin cash buffer that can drop back to zero. Because the fund never reaches the needed scale, they cannot upgrade location, hire help, expand capacity, learn new techniques, or improve management; each small gain is vulnerable to one unexpected expense.

Research by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir frames scarcity as “capturing the mind”: limited money or time consumes cognitive “bandwidth” (ability plus executive control) and produces tunnel vision and short-term choices. The text notes Mullainathan won a MacArthur award at age 29. Farmers perform better on tests right after harvest than when poor, suggesting poverty can both result from and create impaired decision-making. Perception compounds it: the same ambiguous performance by a student named “Hannah” is judged more favorably when she is labeled middle-class than when she is labeled poor.

When bandwidth is occupied by urgent scarcity, people and organizations underinvest in important-but-not-urgent protections, deepening the trap. A cited organizational failure is NASA’s 1998 Mars mission loss of $125 million after avoidable unit mismatches (imperial vs. metric) slipped through. The proposed response combines individual strategies (future-oriented thinking, better allocation, more “safety valves”) with policy design that reduces bias and tilts key opportunity gateways—education and early-stage support—toward those starting with less.