Why Information Abundance Creates Attention Poverty

Open with Simon's core idea and translate it into a modern problem: more content raises the cost of being noticed while human attention stays fixed. Set up the series promise: an economic and behavioral model that explains why visibility wins over quality.

Herbert Simon identified the paradox in 1971: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. At the time, the information environment was constrained by distribution costs. Today, those costs are effectively zero, and the volume of content competing for human attention has grown by orders of magnitude while the human attention supply has not.

The result is a structural shift in what communication must do. Getting noticed is no longer about having something worth saying—it is about passing a rising threshold of signal strength in an increasingly crowded environment. This post introduces the economic and behavioral logic that explains why that threshold keeps rising and what it costs everyone who competes in it.