The Poverty of Attention

The poverty of attention is Adam Smith’s water-diamond paradox applied to the knowledge economy of the AI age. Smith observed that water, indispensable to life, commands no market price, while diamonds, superfluous to survival, command a high one: the paradox resolves because value tracks marginal scarcity, not total utility. The AI revolution produces the same paradox for competent text, code, design, and analysis. These goods remain indispensable to the functioning of the modern economy; their total utility is vast. But when large language models can produce them at the price of a natural-language conversation, their supply expands without limit and their marginal value falls toward zero. The scarce resource—the diamond of the new economy—migrates upstream to the evaluative, discriminating attention that can distinguish the excellent from the merely competent, the right from the merely plausible, the wise from the merely efficient. The poverty of attention is not a shortage of information or production. It is the specific impoverishment that