"Attention Economy" Is Older Than the Internet by 25 Years

"Attention economy" reads like a phrase invented for the smartphone era - coined, probably, sometime after Facebook's News Feed launched, by someone describing what feeds do to a scrolling thumb. It's older than that by a quarter century, and the person who articulated it wasn't thinking about phones, feeds, or advertising at all. He was a Nobel-winning economist writing about how organizations drown in paperwork.

The Man Who Said It First

Herbert A. Simon won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978, for research into how organizations actually make decisions - not the idealized, perfectly-informed decision-making of classical economic theory, but the messier version practiced by real institutions with limited time and incomplete information. He's also considered one of the founding figures of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, which matters here: Simon spent his career thinking rigorously about the mechanics of processing information under real constraints, years before "information overload" was a phrase anyone used casually.

In 1971, in an essay called "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," Simon wrote the sentence that would eventually get quoted in a completely different context, decades later, by people who'd mostly never read the essay it came from: "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

What He Was Actually Writing About

The essay wasn't about consumers, entertainment, or persuasion. Simon was addressing a practical problem facing large organizations in a world where information technology - primitive by today's standards, but genuinely new at the time - was starting to make more information available to decision-makers than they could possibly process. His concern was structural and almost mathematical: attention doesn't expand to match the information available to consume it. It's a fixed, scarce resource, and every additional unit of available information is competing for a slice of a pool that doesn't grow to meet the demand. That's not a psychological observation about willpower or distraction. It's closer to a law of resource allocation, stated in economic terms because Simon was, at his core, an economist studying how limited resources get allocated under real-world constraints.

Read that way, the sentence isn't really about being distracted by your phone. It's about a scarcity relationship that exists any time information supply outpaces the capacity to process it - true of a manager's inbox in 1971, and true, it turns out, of a feed in 2026, for exactly the same structural reason.

Why the Sentence Outlived Its Original Context

What makes Simon's framing genuinely prescient, rather than just a nice quote that happens to apply, is the economic logic underneath it. Once you accept that attention is a scarce, non-expandable resource being competed for by an ever-growing supply of information, you've described the exact precondition for a market. Scarce resources get bought, sold, and optimized for extraction by whoever can build the infrastructure to do it efficiently. Simon wasn't proposing that market - he was diagnosing the underlying scarcity that made one inevitable, decades before anyone had built the infrastructure of ad-tech, engagement metrics, and recommendation algorithms that now runs almost entirely on harvesting exactly the resource he named.

It's worth being precise about what's actually novel today and what isn't. The scarcity Simon described in 1971 hasn't changed in kind - attention was finite then and is finite now, for the same underlying reasons. What changed is that an entire, extremely well-funded industry has since organized itself specifically around measuring, capturing, and reselling that scarce resource at a scale and precision Simon had no way of anticipating. The economics were sound fifty-five years early. The market just hadn't caught up to them yet.

Simon's Other Famous Idea, and Why It Fits

The attention-scarcity insight isn't an isolated one-off in Simon's body of work - it connects directly to the idea he's most remembered for among economists: bounded rationality, the observation that real decision-makers don't have the time, information, or processing capacity to make the fully optimal choice classical economic theory assumes, and instead "satisfice" - settle for a choice that's good enough given real constraints. Attention scarcity is, in a sense, the resource-level version of the same insight. Bounded rationality describes why decisions fall short of theoretical optimality; attention scarcity describes one of the concrete, physical reasons why - there simply isn't enough of the resource decision-making runs on to process everything a fully rational agent would need to consider. The two ideas were never meant to be read separately. Simon spent a career arguing that human decision-making has to be understood as operating under real resource limits, and attention was one of the clearest limits he identified.

How Fast the Underlying Math Gets Worse

Part of what makes Simon's 1971 framing feel more urgent with each passing decade is that the scarcity he described isn't static - the supply side of the equation keeps growing, while the demand side, human attentional capacity, is fixed by biology and hasn't meaningfully changed. Each new platform, each new format, each new creator economy adds to the pool of information competing for the same non-expanding resource. A scarcity that was already worth writing an essay about in 1971, when "information-rich" meant computer printouts and internal memos, describes something considerably more lopsided now that the competing supply includes every video, post, and article produced globally in real time. The economics didn't change. The imbalance the economics describe kept widening.

A Detail Worth Noticing: Who the Solution Was For

Simon's essay, true to its purpose, spent real effort proposing solutions - mostly around designing better filtering systems so organizations could allocate their employees' scarce attention toward the information that actually mattered for a given decision. The filtering was in service of the organization and, by extension, the people inside it trying to do their jobs well. That detail is easy to miss, but it matters: a system built to manage scarce attention isn't automatically built to protect the person whose attention is scarce. It depends entirely on who's doing the allocating and on whose behalf.

Modern attention-harvesting platforms are also, in a sense, filtering systems managing a scarce resource - just optimized for a different beneficiary. The feed decides what's worth your limited attention, using extraordinarily sophisticated methods, in service of an advertising business model rather than in service of you. Simon's economics explain why the scarcity exists and why an industry formed around it. They don't guarantee that industry is allocating your attention toward what you'd actually choose, if the choice were legibly yours to make.

A Scarcity That Doesn't Feel Like Other Scarcities

Most scarce resources make their scarcity obvious - a low balance, an empty tank, a shrinking pile. Attention's scarcity is unusually easy to miss in the moment, because spending it doesn't feel like spending anything at all. Nobody watches a mental balance draw down while scrolling the way they'd watch a fuel gauge drop on a drive. That's part of what makes Simon's framing genuinely useful rather than just a clever historical footnote: it names a resource that behaves economically - finite, competed-over, allocable - while feeling, subjectively, like it costs nothing to spend. A resource that's scarce but doesn't feel scarce is precisely the kind of resource an efficient market gets very good at extracting, because the person spending it has the weakest possible signal that anything is actually being spent.

Reclaiming a Small Piece of the Allocation

Putting some of that allocation back under your own control doesn't require rejecting the information economy Simon described - it's not going anywhere, and most of what it delivers is genuinely useful. It just means having at least one filtering mechanism working on your side of the transaction instead of the platform's. A notification schedule is one crude version. Dam It is a narrower one, aimed specifically at the short-form feeds engineered hardest to consume the scarce resource Simon named - not by limiting how much information exists, but by putting a small, deliberate constraint back on how much of your attention it can pull in without you choosing to give it.