ALLOCATING ATTENTION.

ALLOCATING ATTENTION. Economists think in terms of allocating a limited amount of a resource. Traditionally, they deal with the problem of efficiently allocating a limited income. I posted here about how economists are now thinking about allocating time and that some psychologists are thinking in terms of allocating a willpower budget. Sam Anderson quotes the great economist Herbert Simon as pointing out in 1971 that: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”