And if we assume attention is valuable, while everything else is valueless, we've been pretty good at destroying what's valuable for what's valueless in the past century.

Some of us pour our attention into games and movies instead of sharing it with those close to us.

Some of us pour our attention into hour long commutes where we spend our utmost effort not to give attention to anyone near us - it might make them uncomfortable.

Some of us pour our attention on those who already have a lot of it, who cannot possibly return it to us - famous youtube personalities, celebrities, porn stars even.

We spend our time fine-tuning our processes to be as "efficient" as possible, from the queue in the supermarket, to the queue in the fast food restaurant, to reduce our shopkeepers and waiters to mere actors following a script efficiently, and in some cases, completely replace them with machines.

We make our workplace a place where colleagues gather for majority of their lives, but make it difficult to form enduring long term friendships.

We spend lots of time worrying about economic inequality but much less time about attention inequality. The only relevant policy we do have is subsidised psychologic care.

It's inhumane to deny human food, that's why we provide welfare. It's inhumane to neglect a child's need for parental love, which is why we place orphans in foster homes (not perfect). And what about adults, what do we do about attention inequality in terms of family, friendship, and sexual partners? We just sort of leave it up to them to figure it out, and then when we read about suicides in the paper, we write a comment "if you feel this way please seek help immediately".

This is a summary of what I find wrong about modern society, and I have no solution besides enjoying the giving of time to those close to me when they ask for it.

We've become a lot more efficient trading away our attention for physical goods that don't really matter to us except to trade in a zero sum game for more attention.

I'm excited to see the phrase "attention inequality". I've had similar thoughts for a few years and suspect that's a fertile line of inquiry.

I haven't gotten far enough along in thinking about it to say anything very clear, but I think the relationship between our attitudes about wealth inequality vs attention inequality is important and telling.

To many who don't think deeply, wealth inequality is terrible while attention inequality is natural and no big deal.

The two kinds of inequality cause each other, which is also interesting. But mostly I'm interested in how our attitudes about one kind can or cannot, must or must not, apply to the other.

EDIT: To circle back to your point, I disagree that attention can be "destroyed". I prefer to say that attention can never be destroyed, only shifted from one thing to another. So if you are ignoring your family and playing video games, you have not destroyed your attention, you have instead shifted it to the video game (and its creators).

True, everyone has 24 hours a day, though what I really mean is the utility of that attention can be destroyed - the utility of 10 hours of your attention for the video game creator is measured in tens of dollars but could be priceless to your children.

And I'm happy you are excited to see this phrase. :-)

> Some of us pour our attention into games and movies instead of sharing it with those close to us.

> Some of us pour our attention on those who already have a lot of it, who cannot possibly return it to us - famous youtube personalities, celebrities, porn stars even.

I think you've got this backwards. Those technologies are ways for the people who have the most attention to give out more attention than they could ever possibly do in person. They're precisely what makes the attention economy positive-sum.

You're saying that the video game or the celebrity is giving attention to the person watching it? Either I don't understand your comment, or you are the one who has it backwards...

Yes. Not perfectly, of course, but it gives them the experience of having attention paid to them.

I can see how that's true in MMORPG's, but what about single player games? You could argue they give the temporary feeling of receiving attention, but it goes away when we stop partaking in that activity and we don't receive actual benefits of receiving attention - it was smoke and mirrors.

I think it's the same experience. There's a reason these single-player games usually cast you in the role of someone important, pivotal even.

What are those "actual benefits" that players miss out on?

When you spend an hour with your child, the child matures by another hour worth of your attention. The relationship also becomes an hour stronger, plus you gain memories associated with the hour. With single player games there is only the memory, no relationship building and no nurturing provided. Good observation about most games make us someone important.

It's certainly possible to learn and mature from one's experience in single-player gaming. And many games give the experience of developing a relationship.

A game can give the illusion of a relationship, but it is not a real relationship with another human being. The evolutionary reasons why we need relationships are because having other humans care about us helps us live better lives. A game, which does not care about you, may partially satisfy that evolved need but cannot provide any of the real-world benefits of an actual relationship with an actual person who actually cares about you.

You're begging the question. Games already fill human needs - that's why we play them - and things like entertainment are no less real-world than physical objects. I believe Love Plus already e.g. buys players gifts (based on their wishlists)? A game won't yet do things like taking care of you if you're sick, sure, but I suspect that's only a matter of time.

You think I am begging the question because you think that

> things like entertainment are no less real-world than physical objects.

but this is false.

A relationship in the real world with a human being is not the same thing as a relationship with an AI that you interact with through a screen. It is less real. Are you still experiencing feeling? Yes. Are you communicating? Yes. Is it real? Yes, of course it is real, just like my iPhone is real, servers in a datacenter somewhere are real, and the medium is real even though it is a different medium. Nonetheless, it is less real because it is not a human being.

From an evolutionary perspective, we enjoy certain things (type A) because they lead to other things (type B) that make our survival and reproduction more likely. This is what the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy is about. When a machine process gives you the type A things but of course cannot ever give you the type B benefits that actually created those evolutionary pressures, then you are on some level being fooled. When I say "less real" this is what I am talking about.

The fact that you point out that a game won't take care of you while you are sick shows me that you get my point.

Email in my profile if you want to take the discussion further. It's getting a bit off-topic here but I am interested in the topic, and yes, in the real, human conversation we are having. ;-)

But that also illustrates why economic inequality is getting blamed unfairly. Reducing inequality will not produce more hot women or flats in Manhattan/SF. The same number of people will get hot women, it's just that more women will go for dangerous unemployable bad boys and fewer will go for wealthy investment bankers or techies.

This is true if you assume strict monogamy, of both housing and mates. When inequality becomes very great, the very wealthy can purchase a greater share of the available housing (see ghost flats in London and Vancouver) and monopolize the reproductive years of a greater number of mates (usually women). To give a very rough example - when inequality is within a bridgeable margin (say an order of magnitude), a young woman may decide to marry the nice young doctor/coder rather than chase the fabulously wealthy scion. Presumably the promise of high spousal and parental investment on the part of the less-wealthy potential mate compensates for the reduced immediate access to material resources. If inequality becomes very large, it may be rational for that same woman to roll the dice on joining the throng chasing the scion. Where polygamy is normal, this is often what we observe. The case for housing is less clear - I would be interested to know whether there was a time when desirable housing was more normally distributed, although I have heard this was the case for white Americans in midcentury CA.

When inequality becomes very great, the proportion of very wealthy goes down far faster than their ability to consume.

I'm sure Richard Branson has a soft harem (to borrow the pickup-artist "soft polygamy" terminology). If he has a new girl every day (I'm half his age and I doubt I could physically pull that off) that's still only 365/year. As inequality goes up there are far fewer Richard Bransons as a proportion of the population.

I'm just middle class, and I've often had 2-4 women in my soft harem at any one time. That means 100 guys like me - with no particular excess of money - can easily have the same effect as Branson would.

I did some calculations a while back. If all the high net wealth people in NYC have 10 houses each, they'll have the same effect on housing as building one more NYU. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022235#12022920

Our shortage of housing and attractive women is caused by an increasing middle class competing for them, and an inability/unwillingness (depending on how you characterize exclusionary zoning and an unwillingness to put down the fork) to increase the supply.

I did some somewhat similar calculations for my country. What you say is true and doesn't even just apply to the super-rich. The amount of people who have 10 or more times higher income than average is around 1 in 100 people in my country.

So the frequency drops by 2 orders of magnitude as income ratio grows by 1 order of magnitude.

In the US it's perhaps not 1:100, but it's also unlikely to be anywhere near 1:10.

So yes, the average person "suffers" from competition from people who are near their general level of income way more than from competition from rich people.

I'd like to point out - the increased participation of people in "soft harems" reduce the number of mates available in monogamy relationships. The resource "Exclusivity * attention" (what a lot of people value) is being destroyed by the increasing number of people engaging in polygamy; the number of monogamous mates available is reduced in the sense that it makes it harder for monogamous mates to find each other in a polygamous world. And inequality is increased - "superstars" have 365 mates instead of just 1.

I don't think you understood the point, I am not arguing against that. I am arguing that these "superstars" are not important because they are so rare compared to the increased number of partners they can have. They are, as a group, less competition for an average person than middle class people who mostly have from zero to a small number of partners but are very numerous.

Ok. Good point.

In a world where women can support themselves, being rich is just one factor of being attractive to women. There are plenty of guys who are very successful with women despite not being rich, because it is not a requirement that they be able to support them. So in theory, if you removed wealth inequality, certain individuals would just dominate romantic life for other reasons.

However, your argument is flawed in other ways.

There isn't a strict limit after which women will marry a guy for money (what you call a bridgeable margin - it doesn't exist). Obviously this is gradual and different for each woman. So the probability that a randomly selected woman would marry a guy for his money grows with his income.

In this situation, the order of magnitude of inequality becomes irrelevant because the two orders of magnitude richer than average guy will be an order of magnitude rarer than the one order of magnitude richer than average guy (in the worst possible case, in reality they will be even rarer). So even though the extremely rich guy can do "more damage" to the rest of society by hogging something, there are less of them, so in total they hog the same amount. So this order of magnitude doesn't actually make a difference.

These are great points, and I regret that I used an example that inadvertently framed the discussion around "women marrying for money"- In fact I believe that women have a surprisingly catholic breadth of mate choice criteria, and the data available on reproductive variability in modern societies seem to bear this out. As the preceding comments note, the existence of a Zipf-distributed hyper-elite is not necessarily a big problem for certain categories of goods. I am actually more interested in the effects of the collapse of alternative status hierarchies and how this affects different status 'tournaments'. Global competitions seem to converge on a single figure of merit, and I wonder whether jagged multimodal distributions on a single variable produce different 'competitions' than normal distributions or multivariate distributions. I would also note that an individual or group can affect a resource competition without directly consuming the resource itself.

These goods are not even zero-sum, they're negative sum! This is one of the reasons large inequality is inefficient: larger and larger amounts of our production go to competition over these scarce goods without actually increasing the amount of them available to go around.

We're a long way off from a system where a rising tide would lift all boats.