"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"
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Simon lands the punchline like an engineer: no mysticism, no hand-wringing, just a conservation law for modern life. Treat information as an unalloyed good and you miss the hidden cost in the transaction. Every message, alert, report, and headline doesn’t merely inform; it bills you in the only currency you can’t mint more of. The brilliance is the reversal: “wealth” and “poverty” swap places. In an environment of abundance, scarcity doesn’t disappear, it migrates.
The intent is quietly political as much as technical. By naming attention as the bottleneck, Simon shifts power away from those who produce information and toward those who control its routing: editors, managers, interface designers, platforms. If attention is scarce, then “allocation” becomes the central problem - and the central opportunity for manipulation. The subtext reads like an early warning about an economy built not on selling facts but on capturing focus. When attention becomes the limiting factor, the fight isn’t over truth alone; it’s over friction, habit, and compulsion.
Context matters: Simon helped found ideas in cognitive science and organizational decision-making, fields obsessed with bounded rationality - the reality that humans can’t process everything, so they satisfice. This quote prefigures the internet age with eerie accuracy, but it wasn’t prophecy so much as systems thinking. Information overload isn’t a personal failing; it’s an architectural one. If you want better decisions, you don’t just add data. You redesign the environment that competes to consume the mind.
The intent is quietly political as much as technical. By naming attention as the bottleneck, Simon shifts power away from those who produce information and toward those who control its routing: editors, managers, interface designers, platforms. If attention is scarce, then “allocation” becomes the central problem - and the central opportunity for manipulation. The subtext reads like an early warning about an economy built not on selling facts but on capturing focus. When attention becomes the limiting factor, the fight isn’t over truth alone; it’s over friction, habit, and compulsion.
Context matters: Simon helped found ideas in cognitive science and organizational decision-making, fields obsessed with bounded rationality - the reality that humans can’t process everything, so they satisfice. This quote prefigures the internet age with eerie accuracy, but it wasn’t prophecy so much as systems thinking. Information overload isn’t a personal failing; it’s an architectural one. If you want better decisions, you don’t just add data. You redesign the environment that competes to consume the mind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|---|
| Source | Herbert A. Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," 1971, in M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, pp. 40-41. |
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