The Problem of Attention

William James put it plainly more than a century ago: everyone knows what attention is (James, 1890). We feel it as the act of taking possession of one object out of several possible — a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

The trouble is that this everyday certainty dissolves the moment we try to budget it. We speak of "paying" attention, "spending" time, of tasks that are "cheap" or "expensive", and yet we plan our days as though attention were free and infinitely divisible. It is neither.

Treat it instead as an economist would treat any scarce resource: something with a fixed supply over a given interval, a price that rises with demand, and opportunity costs that are paid whether or not we notice them. The rest of this book follows that one move to a few of its conclusions — beginning, in the next chapter, with a model small enough to write down.

References