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It’s become commonplace to observe that the modern economy is clearly about more than land, raw materials, and hours of labor. It’s about attention, intention, and motivation–and economic forces will seek to value and monetize these traits just as much as they will value steel or pizza.

Back in 1971, for example, Herbert Simon (Nobel ’78) was writing: “Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a  need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information resources that might consume it.” More recently, economists are suggesting the possibility that artificial intelligence technologies may lead from a shift from an “information economy,” based on collecting and selling information, to a “intention economy,” based on using that information to influence what people intend. There’s a saying that encapsulates the idea that your information and attention are being marketed, perhaps in a way that will be used to influence your decisions: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.”

In “The Economics of Attention,” George Loewenstein and Zachary Wojtowicz pull together the existing economic research on this topic (Journal of Economic Literature, September 2025, 63: 3, 1038–89, or you can also download ungated versions from several places, like here). In the abstract, they write:

Attention is an important resource in the modern economy and plays an increasingly prominent role in economic analysis. We summarize research on attention from both psychology and economics with a particular emphasis on its capacity to explain documented violations of classical economic theory. We also identify promising new directions for research, including attention-based utility, the recent proliferation of attentional externalities introduced by digital technology, the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the economics of attention, and the significant role that boredom, curiosity, and other motivational states play in determining how people allocate attention.

The review is comprehensive, and I make no effort to do justice to it here. But I was struck by how much of the focus of the existing economic reseach is focused on the attention of possible and actual consumers–that is, in shaping what people are willling to buy and willing to pay. For example, the authors write:

Globally, the average person now spends about six and a half hours on the internet each day, and one-third of US adults report that they are online “almost constantly.” Many of today’s most profitable businesses, such as internet search and social media, generate revenue through “user engagement,” which effectively means attracting and redirecting individuals’ attention. Increasingly, attention has become a commodity that can be bought, sold, and even “fracked” or “stolen” …

Of course, one way of dealing with information and attention constraints is to use social media, like this blog, to make first contact with ideas in a more time-efficient way.

Attention manifests itself not just as a matter of consumption choices, but also in the actions of employees. The authors do discuss this topic as well (did I mention that this is a comprehensive review?). For example, they write (citations omitted):

[M]aintaining focus can engender motivational states, such as boredom, curiosity, flow, and mental effort. The hedonic impact of attentional motivation forms a significant portion of the overall utility people derive from many productive activities. Thus, the joys and sorrows of work are, in many instances, the pleasures and pains of maintaining attentional focus.

Workplace boredom, in particular, is an extremely common challenge, especially for repetitive tasks that nevertheless require high levels of sustained vigilance over time, such as tumor detection in mammography and baggage screening for air travel. … [B]oredom generates psychic disutility that increases the extrinsic rewards required to incentivize people to maintain focus, thus driving wages above the economic opportunity cost of time …

In education, a parallel insight has spawned a literature on educational achievement that distinguishes between intelligence and “cognitive endurance”—the ability to sustain attention to difficult tasks over time. … [T]he limited resource of cognitive control plays a key role in determining why and when maintaining attention to a task is aversive. Limited cognitive endurance has been linked to declining performance over time in fields ranging from medicine to school examinations. Individual differences in cognitive endurance predict wages and educational outcomes such as college attendance, college quality, and college graduation, even after controlling for a fatigue-free measure of ability. There is some evidence, however, that cognitive endurance can be improved through practice, with benefits for educational outcomes.

We all know that we live in an economy focused on services and information. For many of us, our jobs are about absorbing information, paying attention, and the responding in a way that shapes and alters the original information. In that world, an stronger powers of cognitive endurance seems like an increasingly important skill for many jobs–including many of those conventionally listed as low-skill, as well as medium- and high-skill.

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