The Economics of Attention: Why What We Measure Becomes What We Value

“What we see, repeat, and reward slowly becomes what we value.”

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We live in an age of abundance. Information, products, and opportunities multiply every year, yet one resource remains stubbornly finite: human attention. Decades ago, Herbert Simon anticipated this imbalance when he argued that in an information-rich world, the scarce factor is not data but attention itself, a “wealth of information” that creates a “poverty of attention.”

Attention today is no longer just a personal challenge of focus. It has become an economic force. What societies, organizations, and platforms choose to notice, measure, and reward ends up shaping behavior and outcomes more powerfully than the underlying facts alone.

Attention as the Hidden Currency

Behind nearly every modern system lies attention as a hidden denominator. Economic indicators, platform metrics, and corporate dashboards are not neutral mirrors of reality; they are tools that direct what decision-makers see and act upon.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for example, does not simply record economic activity. It functions as a headline scoreboard that orients governments, markets, and public debate around “growth,” even though it was never intended as a comprehensive measure of social welfare. Similarly, digital platform metrics such as views, watch time, and likes do not merely reflect user preferences. They operate as feedback signals that encourage creators, advertisers, and news organizations to optimize for engagement.

The result is a quiet but powerful rule: what gets measured becomes what matters, while what is difficult to quantify, mental health, trust, environmental stability, and social cohesion, risks being ignored or undervalued.

When Measurement Distorts Value

GDP illustrates the dangers of over-reliance on a single metric. It rises with spending on pollution cleanup, traffic accidents, or cigarettes just as it rises with spending on education or preventive healthcare. At the same time, it excludes unpaid care work, environmental degradation, inequality, and many dimensions of human well-being. By centering attention on GDP, economic growth has been conflated with social progress, even when the two diverge sharply.

The same logic governs the digital attention economy. Engagement-driven algorithms reward content that is emotionally arousing, novel, or polarizing because such material captures attention more efficiently. Nuance, context, and slow-forming insight struggle to compete in environments optimized for immediacy and scale.

Healthcare systems reveal a similar misalignment. Payment models built around procedures and treatments reward visible intervention more than long-term prevention. Hospitals and providers often receive greater financial returns when patients are ill than when populations remain healthy, not due to individual intent, but because measurement and incentive structures prioritize short-term, countable actions over long-horizon well-being.

Frames Don’t Just Describe Reality: They Create It

Research in behavioral economics and psychology shows that humans systematically overweight what is vivid, immediate, and salient while underweighting what is diffuse, gradual, or invisible. Plane crashes command fear; chronic disease kills quietly. Job automation sparks panic: biodiversity loss unfolds with little sustained attention.

Indicators and narratives act as frames that shape perception and behavior. They do not merely highlight reality; they actively construct it. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) framework demonstrates this principle in practice. By redefining progress around domains such as psychological well-being, health, governance, and ecological resilience, and embedding these metrics into policy evaluation, Bhutan shows how alternative measures can redirect institutional priorities.

'Change the frame, and incentives follow.'

Who Sets the Scoreboard Controls the Game

Control over metrics is a form of power in the attention economy. When governments adopt well-being dashboards, climate indicators, or inclusive wealth accounts, they alter what appears strategically important and therefore deserve funding and legitimacy. Conversely, when public debate is dominated by quarterly GDP figures or stock market indices, issues that fail to move those numbers struggle to command attention.

Markets exhibit the same dynamics. The rise of ESG and impact investing reflects attempts to redefine corporate success beyond short-term profit alone. Firms that successfully reframe categories, such as positioning electric vehicles as climate technology platforms rather than merely transportation products, can attract disproportionate capital and cultural attention relative to their current financial performance.

Attention follows the frame, not the spreadsheet.

The Real Question!

If the future is shaped by competition for limited attention, then the most strategic act is not shouting louder, but framing better. For societies, this means complementing GDP with multidimensional measures of health, equity, environmental limits, and subjective well-being and using them meaningfully in policy and budgeting.

For organizations and individuals, it means designing scoreboards that reflect what genuinely matters: learning, trust, resilience, and long-term contribution, rather than defaulting to what is easiest to count.

In the end, the metrics we choose do not merely describe the world. They decide which parts of reality are seen, funded, and protected, and which are discounted and allowed to erode.

-Ganit.

References

1. Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins University Press.

2. Varian, H. R. (1998). The information economy. Scientific American, 279(3), 200–201.

3. Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Paris.

4. Stiglitz, J. E. (2020). GDP is the wrong tool for measuring what matters. Scientific American.

5. Coyle, D. (2017). Household work and economic measurement. Finance & Development, International Monetary Fund.

6. United Nations. (2020). The attention economy: Capturing human attention in the digital age. UN Policy Brief.

7. OECD. (2024). Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. Well-being Knowledge Exchange Platform.

8. Alkire, S., & Ura, K. (2012). A short guide to the Gross National Happiness Index. Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative.