I wrote a PhD dissertation that made this point in 2013, and proposed a new "helocentric" economic model.
The key shift is to move the utility function from evaluating a future state of the world to evaluating the utility of an opportunity for attention in the present moment.
All the "cognitive errors" that we humans make are with respect to predicting the future. But we all know what we find appealing in the present moment.
And when we look at economics from this new perspective of the present, we get an economics of attention. We can measure, and model, for the first time, how we choose how to allocate the scarce resource of the internet age: human attention.
I dropped out of academia as soon as I finished this work, and never publicized it broadly within academia, but I still believe it has great potential impact for economics, and it would be great to get the word out.
>> All the "cognitive errors" that we humans make are with respect to predicting the future. But we all know what we find appealing in the present moment.
I like to say that most human problems are a result of the conflict between short and long term goals. This is true at all levels from individuals to small groups, companies, and states. Many, many "failures" can be framed this way. I would say it's not even a problem of predicting the future (thought that is an issue) but of failure to prioritize the future over the present.
The key shift is to move the utility function from evaluating a future state of the world to evaluating the utility of an opportunity for attention in the present moment.
All the "cognitive errors" that we humans make are with respect to predicting the future. But we all know what we find appealing in the present moment.
And when we look at economics from this new perspective of the present, we get an economics of attention. We can measure, and model, for the first time, how we choose how to allocate the scarce resource of the internet age: human attention.
I dropped out of academia as soon as I finished this work, and never publicized it broadly within academia, but I still believe it has great potential impact for economics, and it would be great to get the word out.
https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation.html