What is the price of attention? One answer is what Meta charges to capture your gaze for a moment: for $100, a company can buy roughly 20,000 views of a post. But the more important question is the cost to you of becoming inattentive. For a student, that might mean a failed exam, lower grades, and in the long run a missed educational opportunity. In working life, it can show up as poorer performance and stalled career progress. This also leads to costs for companies and society at large.

There are many bridges between psychology and economics, and the question of attention has been on economists’ mind for a long time. The polymath Herbert Simon—winner of both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in Economics—famously wrote: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and the need to allocate that attention efficiently.” Attention is scarce, and allocation matters. In a new article¹, the behavioral economists Loewenstein and Wojtowicz continues this line of thinking. They propose that attention can be viewed as an economic resource, akin to capital, land or labor. Psychological findings help explain why people depart from the ideal, rational, maximizing agent — think of anchoring, loss-aversion, availability heuristic — and other effects described by Tversky and Kahneman.

A similar theme was discussed at a recent gathering of the G7 conference where attendees were told that the future of economic growth depends on optimizing ‘brain capital,’ which includes cognitive abilities such as attention and working memory². An interesting take on this discussion is an article³ suggesting that economists are increasingly modelling brain-rot, the zombie-like scrolling of meaningless but attention-grabbing content, as theft.

The subjective cost of inattention is large. The market sells a thousand looks for a few dollars; the bill you pay in learning, work, and well-being, can be high. Perhaps we are selling our attention too cheaply.

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1. George Loewenstein, Zachary Wojtowicz (2025) The Economics of Attention. Journal of Economic Literature. vol. 63, no. 3, September 2025 (pp. 1038–89).

2. Jennifer Shenker (2025) The Brain Economy: The New New Thing. The Innovator News Letter.  

3. Can you make it to the end of this column? Understanding the new economics of attention, The Economist. 11 Sep. 2025

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