Governments around the world constantly strive to reduce - if not completely eliminate - poverty within their respective countries. But the question has arisen of whether these programmes are enough, seeing as the unseen impacts of the scarcity mentality may make it even more difficult to escape poverty. We speak to Eldar Shafir, a behavioural economist at Princeton University, about scarcity, the behavioural effects of Covid-19, and avoiding the thick-skin bias in policymaking.