Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Yes. Yes. One of the major points I don't think is made nearly enough is that the attentional supply is a commons. Sure, each individual has agency over how they direct their attention. But if a particular actor consumes the vast majority of it, they should be regulated/taxed.

"...the attentional supply is a commons." ? I can't think of anything that belongs less to the commons than my personal attention & cognition

The commons model seems useful and predictive to me. In the original example, you scramble your cow to the commons first to over-graze it before everyone else does - a wealth-destroying Nash equilibrium. 1/4

Similarly, media organizations scramble to get a story out first, even though it'll be inaccurate, because if they don't, someone else will. You could make better use of that attention, but not if someone else gets it first. 2/4

In another version, we pollute the air because we get the private benefit but barely feel the marginal harm. Analogously, the media over-use superlatives and outrage and "number 7 will shock you" clickbait tricks. 3/4

Fish probably feel like their personal attention and flesh don't belong to the commons either, but they're over-fished nonetheless :( 4/4

I think this is confusing something like network effects/monopoly with a consumption of finite resources? Directing attention to the thing you want to look at vs. the thing that's available is a search problem, not a consumption problem.

That said, you can model a human population as a pool of potential productivity that is diminished with leisure beyond some calculable optimum, and maybe generate useful ideas about growth, etc... but people, understandably, don't want to be well-managed fish