The Economist.
Hello, Alice Fullwood here.
Co-host of Money Talks, our weekly podcast on markets, the economy, and business.
Welcome to Editors Picks.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist.
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They call it brainrot.
Inane short-form videos just stimulating enough to keep you watching and scrolling, in a zombie-like manner,
through whatever the algorithm presents next;
not quite dull enough for you to tear your monetisable eyeballs away from the screen.
Viewers are ambivalent.
Such content offers a way to switch off.
It also offers a way to waste hours of your life.
Economists may soon start to think of brainrot as a means of theft.
Increasingly, the discipline is modelling attention as a resource, alongside land, labour and capital.
Attention is scarce and rivalrous in the field's jargon; time spent on brainrot cannot be spent on something else.
Focus, being vital to most forms of work, aids production and can be consumed in leisure.
Getting the most out of, say, reading a newspaper column requires your full attention,
which can be hard to provide if your phone is nearby.
Treating attention as a scarce resource helps bridge some of the gap between traditional models of Homo economicus