Our Deputy Director was one of the keynote speakers at the European Commission’s conference on the application of behavioural insights to public policy earlier this week. The biannual gathering is becoming one of the biggest gatherings of European policymakers interested in applying behavioural insights. To coincide with the event, the European Commission published a paper, which takes inspiration from the work of the Behavioural Insights Team, and considers how insights from behavioural sciences can support the policy making processes of the EU as well as those of Member States. Also speaking was the excellent Professor Eldar Shafir, who spoke about his recently published book Scarcity, whose central premise is that scarcity of various kinds (time, money, social bonds, food) focuses the mind and impacts upon behaviour – so that the mind orients towards those unfulfilled needs.