The Poverty Simon Predicted

In 1971 a man who had helped build the first thinking machines sat down to write about how organizations should handle their mail.

Herbert Simon was fifty-five. He had already done the work that would win him a Nobel in economics — the demonstration that human beings do not optimize, they satisfice; that we do not choose the best option, we choose the first one good enough, because we are working with a mind of finite size in a world of infinite detail. He had also, with Allen Newell, written what a fair reading calls the first artificial intelligence program, and predicted in 1957 that a machine would be world chess champion inside a decade. He was off by thirty years, which for a prophet is close enough to be embarrassing rather than wrong.

So when he contributed a chapter to a Johns Hopkins volume called Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, he was not writing as a critic of technology. He was writing as one of its parents. The chapter was called "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," and it was, in the main, a piece of practical advice about institutional plumbing.

Buried in it is the most-quoted sentence in the history of the internet, written twenty years before there was one.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

He was not warning anyone. That is the first thing to understand about the sentence: it is not a lament. It is arithmetic.

Simon's move was to notice that information is not a free-standing good. It is a thing that consumes another thing. Whatever else information does, it eats the attention of whoever receives it — and therefore, in a world where information becomes abundant, the scarce good is not the information. It is the attention.

When an economist says a thing has become scarce, he is not being lyrical. He is making a set of predictions that follow like a proof. A scarce good acquires a price. A price attracts a market. A market attracts people whose living is made by allocating the good, and those people, being people, will follow the price rather than the good, because the price is what pays them. This is not cynicism. It is the ordinary machinery by which societies decide what to make more of.

Simon saw the first half of that clearly, and he wrote about the useful half: how an institution might spend its attention well, given that attention is what it is short of. What he did not write about — because in 1971 there was no reason to — is what happens when the market for a scarce good is not the person who owns it.

It was, by then, already a hundred and forty years old.

In September 1833 a printer named Benjamin Day put out a New York paper called The Sun and priced it at a penny. Every serious paper in the city cost six cents and made its money from the people who read it. Day's cost less than it cost to print. He made his money somewhere else — from advertisers — and what he sold them was the readers.

Tim Wu, in The Attention Merchants, dates the industry to that decision, and the date matters more than it looks. It means the arrangement is not a symptom of the internet, or of the smartphone, or of anything invented in this century. It is a nineteenth-century business model that has been waiting patiently, through every new medium, for better equipment.

It took two years to produce its first masterpiece. In August 1835 the Sun ran six articles reporting the discovery of life on the moon — bat-winged people, unicorns, temples of sapphire — credited to a real astronomer who knew nothing about it. Circulation soared. The paper admitted the fabrication three weeks later and kept the readers. Nearly everything the next two centuries would argue about was present in the first prototype, including the part where being caught costs less than the attention was worth.

The equipment arrived in stages. The illustrated poster, which discovered that a street could be sold. The radio hour underwritten by a soap manufacturer, which gave us the word soap opera and, more importantly, the idea that a story could be a vehicle. The television program engineered to carry you across the break. Each generation performed the same trick with better tools, and each generation was met by people who found the whole thing vulgar and were, in the end, ignored.

What changed in the last twenty years was not the motive. It was the instrumentation.

There is a line every advertising man used to quote — that half his spending was wasted and he didn't know which half. It is attributed to John Wanamaker, and he probably never said it, which is somehow appropriate: for most of its history the attention industry was working blind, buying something it could not see and could not count.

The feed can see. It can count. And a thing that can be measured can be optimized, and a thing that is optimized long enough stops being designed and starts being grown — selected, release after release, test after test, for a single number. Nobody has to intend the result. Selection does not require a conspiracy, or even much talent. It only requires a metric and patience, and it will find things about human beings that no designer would have thought to look for and no focus group would admit to.

That is the honest description of what happened, and it is worse than the villain story, because there is no one to fire.

Running the whole way alongside it is a word.

Every one of these machines, at its introduction, was sold as a cure for human distance. The telegraph would end war; in 1858 two of its chroniclers wrote that old prejudices and hostilities could not survive it. Radio would bind the nations. Television would let us see each other's faces and, seeing them, behave. And then, in our own time, the mission statements — bringing the world closer together, giving everyone a voice, connecting every person on earth.

The uncomfortable part is that all of it was partly true. You can speak to your mother from a bus in another hemisphere for the price of nothing. A person who is ill can find, in an afternoon, forty people with the same rare diagnosis. That is not a small thing and it deserves better than a sneer. Anyone who writes about this subject as though the last century were simply a mistake is asking you to give up something real, and you should not listen to them.

But the connection was the feature. The attention was the business. And when the two pull apart — as they always eventually pull apart, because one is what a thing is for and the other is what it is paid for — the business wins, on a schedule you could set a watch by.

We built machines for attention and called them connection.

The word was not a lie, exactly. It was a description of the product accurate enough to be repeated sincerely by the people building it, and inaccurate in precisely the direction that made it profitable. Those are the most durable kinds of words. They cannot be argued with, because everyone involved means them.

Here it is necessary to slow down, because this genre has a bad habit, and the habit is worth naming.

The habit is to reach for the strongest available finding and then lean on it harder than it can bear.

Consider the most charming study in the field. In 2017 Adrian Ward and his colleagues published work in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research showing that the mere presence of your own phone — face-down, silenced, not touched — measurably reduced working memory and fluid intelligence, and that the effect was strongest in the people most attached to the device. It is an irresistible result. It has been cited thousands of times and repeated at a thousand dinner tables, including by me.

A pre-registered replication published in 2022 did not find it.

Two meta-analyses since have split. One, pooling twenty-two studies, reports a real but small effect concentrated almost entirely in memory — and not statistically significant in North American or European samples. The other, covering fifty-six studies and seven thousand participants, finds one surviving effect out of six and calls the support limited and smaller than theorized.

That does not make the original wrong. Psychology is hard, effects are small, and none of these settles anything alone. But it means the correct statement is that one of the most repeated facts about phones is currently contested, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The same discipline has to be applied all the way down. The 2023 U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness is a serious document about a measured thing: social isolation is widespread and it tracks with mortality. Its most quoted line — that the risk is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day — comes from a 2010 meta-analysis that did not measure loneliness. It measured social connection: network size, social integration, perceived support. The finding is real and it has held for fifteen years across millions of participants; the word attached to it changed somewhere in the retelling. The isolation is measured. The cigarette is a metaphor wearing a lab coat.

Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation argues that a rewiring of childhood by smartphones and social media caused the collapse in adolescent mental health after 2012. It is the most consequential version of this argument anyone has made. It was also reviewed in Nature by Candice Odgers, who has spent her career on exactly this data and concluded that the causal claim outruns the evidence — and who has argued, pointedly, that blaming the phone may be a way of not looking at causes we could actually do something about. Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, working across datasets covering more than three hundred thousand adolescents, found that technology use accounts for at most 0.4 per cent of the variation in adolescent wellbeing — an association about the size of the one with eating potatoes, and smaller than the one with wearing glasses. They also found something more unsettling about the field itself. Across those three datasets there were over six hundred million defensible ways to run the analysis, and the choice among them could deliver a harm, a benefit, or nothing at all.

So: the science is not settled, and there is nothing to be gained by pretending it is.

Now notice what does not require settling.

Nobody disputes what the machines are for. That is not a finding; it is a filing. It is disclosed quarterly, audited by an accounting firm, and read aloud on earnings calls to people who would sue if it were misstated. The revenue line says, in plain language, which side of the transaction you are on. You do not need a p-value to read an income statement.

The case does not rest on harm. It rests on purpose. A thing built to hold your eyes will get better at holding your eyes, year over year, forever, because in that architecture "better" has only one available meaning. Whether or not it is damaging you is a live empirical question. What it is trying to do is a matter of public record.

Simon said poverty, and we heard overwhelm. Those are not the same word.

Overwhelm is a feeling. It arrives, it is unpleasant, it passes; you close the laptop and go for a walk and it lifts. Poverty is a condition of the account. It is not about how you feel today. It is about what you can afford.

What the arrangement has taken is not calm, and it is not happiness, whatever the studies eventually say. It is a specific and unglamorous capacity: the ability to stay with one thing long enough for it to become strange.

That capacity is the entry fee for nearly everything worth having. A difficult page only opens on the third reading. A person only becomes interesting after the part where they are not being interesting yet. A question only turns useful somewhere past the point where holding it is uncomfortable. Grief, prayer, mathematics, love, and every craft anyone has ever been good at run on the same faculty, and it is exactly the faculty that a market for attention is structurally obliged to break down into smaller and more liquid units.

And here is the part that matters, because it is where most writing on this subject goes wrong and turns into scolding.

Nobody lost this by being weak.

We trained. Every one of us has spent between ten and twenty years in continuous, well-funded, superbly designed instruction in a single skill: the rapid evaluation and discard of the present thing in favour of the next one. The curriculum was excellent. The feedback was immediate. The practice was distributed across every idle moment of the day, which is precisely how expertise is built.

We are all very good at it now. It is the most widely held expert skill on earth and not one of us chose to learn it.

You cannot be ashamed of a skill. You can only decide whether you want to learn a different one.

The strangest fact in the whole story is the loneliness, because on paper it should not be there.

Never in the history of the species have so many people been so continuously available to so many others. Every person you have ever met is, at this moment, one thumb-motion away. By every measure the nineteenth century would have used, we have solved distance. And the measured experience of the last decade has not been closeness.

Sherry Turkle saw the shape of it in 2011, before the smartphone was universal, and put it in nine words: we expect more from technology and less from each other.

The economics of that are simple and merciless. A substitute does not have to be as good as the real thing. It only has to be good enough, and cheap enough, and available at the moment the real thing is not. A message is not a conversation. But it is a decent fraction of one at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it is available at eleven at night, and the person on the other end does not have to be met, or travelled to, or forgiven. So the fraction wins. Not because anyone chose the fraction over the whole, but because nobody was ever offered that choice in a single sitting. The price changed, one convenience at a time, and the market for the rest of it quietly thinned.

Nobody decided to stop having friends.

The usual response, at this point in this kind of essay, is discipline. Delete the applications. Grey out the screen. Put the phone in a wooden box during dinner. Some of it genuinely works, and none of it should be mocked by anyone who has tried it.

But it is a private tax, paid by individuals, against a system with a research department. Willpower is not a policy. Asking several billion people to out-concentrate an optimizer is not a plan; it is a way of assigning blame downward.

The other response is the one Simon's arithmetic actually points at, and it is less about consumption than about design.

If attention became a commodity because information became abundant, then the interesting question was never how do I consume less. It is what else could be sitting on the other side of the transaction.

Every machine in the history above answers the same question: how do I keep you here. It is possible — not easy, not obviously profitable, but possible — to build one that answers a different question. Not a gentler version of the same question. A different one.

What would a machine be, if the measure of its success were how you were doing an hour after you closed it?

That is not a flourish. It is a specification, and it has consequences, most of them inconvenient. It means the thing has to be able to end — not pause, not go idle, but end, deliberately, while you are still enjoying it. It means the metric that would make it money and the metric that would make it good point in opposite directions, and somebody has to decide, in advance and in writing, which one loses.

A thing that ends is a thing that is not harvesting. Those are the same sentence read from either side.

Simon named the poverty and then went back to work on the machines. He did not think of them as opposites, and he was right not to. The bill came due, but the arithmetic that produced it is not a law of nature. It is a sequence of decisions, taken by people, mostly for money, in rooms that still exist.

And poverty, unlike loss, is a description of an account at a moment.

Accounts can be refilled.

You've been quite busy. > — Gnoia