Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World

The essay that quietly invented the attention economy. Simon's argument compresses into one sentence: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Written in 1971, read it now in the middle of an LLM-enabled flood of content and the sentence lands harder than it did when he wrote it. The rest of the essay is about what to do about it — how to design organisations for filtering, not for producing. Any product director shipping into feeds, recommendations or search is negotiating Simon's constraint whether they name it or not.