Albert Wenger

But I'm making the point that they are sufficient in the sense that they are not the thing holding us back.

Scarcity, I define as the thing that's really holding us back.

And what's really holding us back is our allocation of attention.

So I think my point is related to Kolata's point, but it is a different point.

So first, people often say to me, Albert, why don't you just say time?

And I say the relation between attention and time is like the relation between velocity and speed.

Speed is just a number.

Velocity is the speed plus the direction in which you're going.

Time is just a number.

Like yesterday had 24 hours.

The day before that had 24 hours.

Attention is what you directed your time, the time of your brain at, right?

And so...

The reason I think that is a fundamental scarcity is because you can't go back and change what you paid attention to yesterday.

That's number one.

And number two, things that are really, really important both to the survival of the species and to the flourishing of the individual are under-allocated in terms of attention.

And the two examples that I give about this all the time are at the individual level, people are not paying nearly enough attention to what is their purpose in life, which is why a lot of people struggle with all sorts of problems, you know, midlife crises.

You know, obviously there are forms of depression that result from sort of chemical changes in your brain, but there's also people who just feel rather less because they've

don't know why they're here or what they could do or what their life means right so that's one example and then the other example is collectively we're not paying nearly enough attention to the climate crisis and how to solve it um there are many other things that we're not paying enough attention to and obviously with the corona crisis virus crisis we just learned that we weren't paying nearly enough attention to preparedness for global pandemics and to fighting like

figuring out ahead of time how to have much better capability of producing vaccines, much better capability of monitoring outbreaks and so forth.