In this podcast, I talk with my old friend and Tax Justice Network co-founder John Christensen about something economics rarely discusses, which is who controls our attention?
Our time is limited. So is our capacity to think, read, listen, understand other people and make sense of the world. That makes attention a scarce economic resource, and modern capitalism has become extraordinarily good at capturing it.
Advertising is the obvious example, but the problem goes much further. Corporations, social media, conventional media and political interests compete constantly for our attention. The result can be distraction from much bigger questions about inequality, climate change, public services, economic power and the way our societies are governed.
John and I discuss the ideas of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, John Kenneth Galbraith and Herbert Simon, alongside the warnings contained in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984.
We also ask what education and economics have to do with our declining capacity for critical thought, and whether distraction can undermine our agency as citizens.
Most importantly, we ask how we reclaim our attention.
Walking, reading, talking, observing and simply creating space to think might sound economically unimportant. We argue precisely the opposite.
If we surrender control of our attention, we risk surrendering our ability to think for ourselves.
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This is the transcript:
In this week's podcast, I talked with my old friend and Tax Justice Network co-founder John Christensen about something that has increasingly concerned me: the economics of attention.
Attention is scarce. We only have so much time in our lives, and what we choose to notice, think about and understand matters enormously. But, as John and I discussed, modern capitalism has become extraordinarily effective at competing for that attention, and in doing so depriving us of the time and space required to think.
I came to this subject through conversations with my wife, Jacqueline, initially prompted by the philosophy of Simone Weil and then the work of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. Both understood attention as something profoundly important. To pay proper attention to another person is to try to understand them and their place in the world. In that sense, attention is an act of generosity.
But attention also has an economic dimension. Herbert Simon recognised this more than half a century ago, while John Kenneth Galbraith had already identified something similar in The Affluent Society. Galbraith understood that affluent societies were no longer characterised by the scarcity that conventional economics presumed. What they lacked instead included adequate public investment and the ideas needed to make society better.
John and I explored what has happened since.
Advertising is an obvious part of the story. Modern capitalism continually demands our attention because it wants us to consume. The implicit message is no longer Descartes' “I think, therefore I am”, but something much closer to “I consume, therefore I am.”
But advertising is only part of the problem. Corporate power also influences the media we consume, the political narratives presented to us, and the economic ideas treated as acceptable. John described corporations as masters of distraction. The purpose is not simply to sell us more things. Distraction can also stop us from paying attention to much bigger issues, including inequality, climate change, pollution, failing public services and the concentration of economic power.
We discussed Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. Both understood, in different ways, that controlling attention could become a means of controlling society. Huxley imagined people distracted and conditioned into accepting their allotted place. Orwell imagined surveillance, propaganda and endlessly rewritten narratives. Elements of both now seem disturbingly relevant.
Education should provide an antidote. Its purpose should include creating people capable of critical thought. Yet we questioned whether modern education is achieving that goal. Universities increasingly sell qualifications while students incur substantial debts, academics face enormous pressures, and the space for genuinely independent thought is constrained. Economics itself has become particularly problematic because much of the discipline has been reduced to mathematical models and familiar claims that bear too little relationship to the economy people actually experience.
The result is that ideas such as the household analogy for government finances, the supposed necessity of austerity, the claim that interest rates are the answer to inflation, and the insistence that tax cuts for the wealthy generate growth are repeated so often that they acquire the appearance of truth. Attention is captured by repetition.
John and I also discussed war as perhaps the ultimate form of distraction. Galbraith regarded war as one of humanity's greatest failures. Orwell understood its usefulness to those seeking to control populations. War absorbs attention, demands loyalty and can crowd out discussion of almost everything else.
That brought us to the question that mattered most to me: how do we reclaim our attention?
For me, part of the answer is deliberately creating space in which to think. I walk. I watch birds. I talk to people. I sometimes turn off the screen and put down the phone. These activities might appear to be distractions from economics, but they are anything but that. Concentrating intensely on something completely different can provide the mental space in which other problems resolve themselves.
John described something similar. Serious thought requires time, conversation, reading and reflection. It also requires discipline about what we allow to claim our attention.
That matters because losing control of our attention means losing something more fundamental: our agency. If we cannot decide what deserves our attention, it becomes much harder to decide what we think. And if we cannot think independently, our ability to participate meaningfully in democracy is diminished.
Our conclusion was therefore that attention is not some peripheral economic curiosity. It is a scarce resource over which there is an intense struggle for control.
Capitalism wants our attention because it wants our money. Corporations want our attention because they want to influence our choices. Political interests want our attention because controlling what we notice can influence what we think matters. Against all of this, reclaiming attention becomes an important act of personal and political agency.
I returned at the end of the discussion to Iris Murdoch's idea that attention is one of the most generous gifts we can offer. We need to pay attention to ourselves, to other people, to our communities, to our countries and to the world around us. Doing so means looking beyond the screens and narratives constantly presented to us and noticing what is actually happening.
And perhaps we also need what John and I jokingly called “weird societies”: places where people willing to think outside the accepted mainstream can meet, talk, listen and give each other the confidence to continue doing so.
As Hunter S. Thompson put it, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
The going is certainly weird now.
Paying attention might be one of the most important things we can do.
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So many people appear incapable of life without being surrounded by noise the local boy racers being a case to point
Is it that they are afraid without it an original though might creep into their mind?
Maybe life is worse when you live in your head. Experience and change is inevitable, living the experience is human nature. We’re not brains in a vat on a shelf. Maybe they are having an experience and living the change?
I have no idea what you mean.
My opinion being that, thinking isn’t the only way to deal with issues in the world. I recommend the documentary “The Divided Brain” or the book it is based on called “The Master and his Emissary”.
To me, this is an old problem. An old song resung. I’ve always wanted to know everything my brain could absorb, but the sheer amount of information versus time available to think overtook me in my early thirties. This is the age when many people suffer ‘burn-out’. The problem was described many years ago as ‘future shock’ by Alvin Toffler in his best selling book. The book , if I remember, was more about the advances of technology than information overload.
I overcame the problem involuntarily due to a health problem that affected my short-term memory and forced me to take a new perspective on what is important to know and what is pleasurable to learn. This is a happy place, arrived at by misfortune. I don’t know where I might have gone otherwise, but I’m sure there are many ways of coping happily with all this information while leading a fulfilled life.
Thanks
Maybe only a truly free people can pay attention?
And it is not attention to the here and now – it is also attention to the past.
‘Man’s struggle against power is that of memory against forgetting.’
– Milan Kundera
Hi Richard,
Another brilliant infographic.
I print these off from my phone using your library and use them as a reference file and to try to spread the word.
However, recent ones do not seem to be appearing in the library or am I missing something?
I must catch up. My mistake.
To what extents have the Education Acts of 1988, 2005 and 2010 taught/imposed minimal, if any, original thinking and questioning?
Ditto minimal, if any, questioning of current conventions, not least socio-economic current conventions/impositions?
I can’t answer that.
A timely post Richard<p>
Lots of Attention-diverting issues have been created over the last thirty years by much of civic space being turned into a market place. Notably Universities Ltd, Academy Schools Ltd , NHS Trusts Ltd, NHS England Ltd, BBC Ltd etc. etc.
Under Cromwell the Puritans were much criticised for banning plays. However, the criticism rather misses the point. The puritans believed that each person needs time for reflection and thought – be that going to church, going for a walk (or cycle ride) etc. Entertainment (going to the theatre and getting pissed afterwards) did not count. Hence the ban.
Have not watched broadcast television for +10 years and have grade 10 firewalls against ads on the computer. Magazine, newspapers? rarely buy them.
In answer to Mr Trevethan – my niece was taught critical thinking @ her school in Wales in the 2010s (a normal comp). Perhaps this is a feature of the welsh education system?
I was taught critical thinking in my Welsh grammar school in the 60’s. Quite specifically I can remember Miss Jenkins talking about advertising techniques, and encouraging us to “question everything you’re told”. I assumed this was something all school taught, but I know from later experience that this is not the case.
It was not. Not now, especially.
Good stuff. I’m stopping halfway to say the pressures on many people make it hard for them to stop and look at the horizon – as you explained in a post on the health effects of prolonged stress.
I was only half with it until I started working part-time and was no longer single parent of school-age children.
I would like a lottery where you win a sabbatical – whatever your occupation or circumstances.
I like that idea!
Thanks for all the work you are doing with this site/clips- being watching for few years now and the digestible youtube clips have really over time filtered into my previously completely ignorant consciousness. Now have enough information to be consistently irritated whenever I hear the soundbites produced by think-tanks and regurgitated by politicians/journalists. This conversation was the best I’ve seen yet I think, really shone a light on the whole process of manufacturing disinformation. Given this, I guess I would like to know what your position is regarding Hegelisan dialectic/Marxism is? If the internal contradictions of neoliberalism cannot be worked out through open conversation because the collective (and as you explain most economists) are perpetually distracted/brainwashed via the medium of massive wealth, how can that be changed? I find Gramsci’s explanations (as much as I understand him) quite conpelling
Thank you. I am pleased that the videos have helped, and I do not I apologise for having provided you with a new reason to be irritated by the news.
I am not a Marxist, and I do not accept Marxism as a complete explanation of either capitalism or how society changes. Nor do I think history necessarily progresses through some predetermined dialectical process.
That did, I do think Marx an important economist (and more) who asked some important questions about ownership, labour, power and who benefits from economic activity. And I agree that Gramsci had something important to say about how an economic system sustains itself.
Power does not survive simply because those who possess wealth can impose their wishes on everyone else. It survives because particular ideas become accepted as common sense. Institutions, education, economics, think tanks, the media and political parties reinforce those ideas until alternatives can appear almost unthinkable.
That is very close to what I think has happened with neoliberalism.
So how does change happen? I think we have to challenge that supposed common sense. We need alternative explanations of money, tax, work, business, ownership, care and the purpose of the economy, and we have to make them understandable enough to become part of ordinary public discussion.
In that sense, I find Gramsci’s thinking about hegemony compelling. Political change requires more than winning an election. It requires changing what people think is possible before, during and after that election. That is, in no small part, what I am trying to contribute to.