Scarcity
An annotated collection of 3 books & papers on scarcity, spanning 1997 to 2013. Featuring works by Michael H. Goldhaber, Thomas Sowell, Sendhil Mullainathan — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Attention Economy and the Net
Goldhaber's 1997 essay coined "the attention economy" as a framework for understanding the internet — the argument that in a world of information abundance, the scarce resource is not information but human attention, and…
Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy
Sowell teaches economics through examples and without equations. The book's claim is that most policy debates are muddled because people do not have a clear picture of how prices, incentives and tradeoffs actually work —…
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
A behavioral economist and a cognitive psychologist demonstrate that scarcity — of any resource — produces a measurable, involuntary cognitive state: heightened focus on the scarce resource at the cost of everything else…