Money is an Attention Allocation Technology (Part 1)
Asking yourself "What is Money?" is the 1st step into a philosophical rabbit-hole that could prove to be the most fascinating intellectual journey of your life…
The question “What is Money?” is deceivingly simple. One would expect the answer to be abundantly clear given its prevalence in daily life, but upon further reflection, most find money to be mysterious. Money is pervasive economic phenomenon, an interpenetrating field of energy influencing human perception, thought, and action. Yet despite the all-encompassing nature of money, its deepest truths remain hidden in plain sight. Here, we explore yet another answer to this curious question—money is an attention allocation technology.
Attention Please!
“Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”—William James
“Attention insinuates itself into a host of phenomena of central concern to philosophers: agency, thought, inference, introspection, perception, and consciousness.”—Wayne Wu, author of Attention (New Problems of Philosophy)
Attention is the essence of all human action. A central capacity of the mind, attention is the act of selection inherent to every human act. Where ever attention goes, human energy naturally flows. But the act of directing attention entails certain opportunity costs: paying attention to any one thing comes at the necessary expense of not paying attention to all other things. Since attention is necessary to resolve any problem, it is humanity’s most precious natural resource, along with the human time and energy of which it is comprised. Given its natural scarcity and with the aim of solving as many problems as possible, humans must allocate their attention in a coordinated way.
For humans, attention is necessary to accomplish anything. Indeed, nothing in this world gets done without being attended to by at least someone. In fact, humanity’s greatest accomplishments are achieved when things are attended to by many, many people over extended durations. Cathedrals are an obvious example: some took over 300 years to construct, so the bricklayers working on the foundations were knowingly giving their full attention to a project that they themselves would never live to see completed. The enterprise of science is a grander example of attention allocation: many lifetimes spent generating hypotheses, conducting experiments, and discarding disproven theories are crucial activities to advancing humanity’s understanding of nature. Such intergenerational cooperation is integral to all the most successful human accomplishments. Economists call this dynamic the division of labor (DOL).
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The essence of the DOL is found in the old adage: “many hands make light work.” The division of labor may perhaps more aptly be thought of as “many minds making light work,” (as, after all, even hands require minds to be useful). A necessary input for using hands or minds is the direction of attention to any given task at hand, so to speak. In terms of tasks, few are more important than work and trade: these activities are the means by which individuals lift both themselves and one another up into higher standards of living. And all of this progress requires the intelligent allocation of limited human attention spans, ideally toward what each individual does best and is willing to work to obtain. Of course, we must be careful with idealizations, as the old Marxist credo “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” for instance, can be dangerously alluring in this respect. But as the 20th century so painfully taught us, Marx’s utopian theory is a dystopia in practice. Instead, the free market has proven itself as a superior allocator of capital (and attention) towards this utopian ideal.
Through this lens of attention, we find a useful framing for the fundamental nature of any market economy: a system for allocating attention toward the satisfaction of wishes humans most want satisfied. This may sound like a radical way to describe an economic system, but if you direct your attention toward a moment of reflection, I think you’ll see its obviousness. After all, where do most people spend most of their lives allocating most their attention? For most modern adults, the answer is: at work, which is roughly equivalent to: in pursuit of money. When you go to work, you are trading your attention to your employer for money. That money can then be later be used to direct the attention of others toward the problems you want solved in exchange for it. In this sense, money is a mere token of human attention and all of the wonderful things it can yield. Want a delicious meal? You’re going to need the attention of a chef, or at least a decent cook. Is your laptop malfunctioning? Then you’ll be needing the attention of a competent computer technician. Although most of us perhaps don’t stop to consider this, attention is a necessary ingredient to all products and services, and therefore, to the satisfaction of all human wants.
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Economists often referred to this necessary ingredient as labor, but I think the subtle distinction is that machines can be built to perform labor, but can not (yet) be built to pay attention in the purposive way humans can. In other words, machines can satisfy the purposes for which they are programmed, but they cannot select purposes by themselves (again, yet). Of course, many machines in modernity are built by other machines. But if you trace this “machine genealogy” back far enough, you will inevitably reach the indispensable ingredient of human attention, as someone had to pay attention to construct the initial machine-making machine at the end of such a sequence of inquiry. Further, attention is essential to maintain machines and the complicated systems they comprise, with the express purpose of “juicing” output.
Like labor, human attention is always comprised of both time and energy. To say it in less words, attention is costly. We can understand this intuitively when we pause and pay attention to the way we talk about attention. When we “pay” attention, it involves us “spending” time and energy focusing our perceptual faculties on someone or something, again at the necessary exclusion of everyone and everything else. Or, when we “seek” attention, we “desire” this payment of time and energy for ourselves. Desire for attention is why many modern women dress themselves like ripe fruit when they go out for a night of fun, and why many men like to buy flashy sports cars, expensive watches, and otherwise engage in acts of “conspicuous consumption”—it’s all Darwinian in the end. It is your author’s view that the primary determinants of the way in which attention flows are twofold: satisfaction and desire. And as I will labor with language to show, this is quite pertinent to economic affairs…
Thank you for reading Money is an Attention Allocation Technology (Part 1).
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It would be very nice to have a link to Part 2 at the beginning.