“Money does a really strange thing. It gives you this sense of omnipotence. But eventually you’re just one person, you look around at all this stuff you’ve acquired and you wonder how you’re ever going to use it.”
That quote is by John McAfee, from an article detailing the 20 million dollar home that he is selling.
This recalled the quote by Goldhaber about the how money is losing it’s appeal as the ultimate must-have item.
You might want to eat all the food in a well-stocked refrigerator at one sitting, but you would probably burst. For the same basic reason — your having only one body, and that of limited size — you can only sleep in so many beds in a night or a lifetime, wear so many clothes, or visit so many spots. But if you were able to get all the world’s attention, it would not cause you any irect bodily harm.
Would you rather have a million dollars, or a million people pay attention to you? Maybe they read your blog, have read your book, watch you on TV, or follow your clickstream. (Ignoring the problem of when the attention lavished on you is out of your control, as it is with celebrities.)
What is the exchange rate between dollars and attention?
I don’t think it would be a simple formula. It would have to do with the starting point of the wealth or attention one already has. Once you have one, the other is easier to obtain, and therefore you are wlling to “pay” less of one to get more of the other. If both are scarce, you’d be more likely to trade one for the other, viewing it as an “investment” that you can, in theory, grow faster than investing, say, your money in stocks or whatever.
Most regular people seek attention (and invest effort and money to get it) only in order to create wealth (dollars in their pocket, sure, there are exceptions) Many people would be interested in purchasing attention for money (look at payperpost). I think straightforward people view attention gathering an “investment” with the ultimate goal being to obtain dollars.
But getting back to your question, I don’t think the answer is linear (and you’d need a “unit of attention” for this discussion to make sense anyway, right?)
I would rather have the million dollars. If John McAfee finds his riches problematic, I’d be glad to tell him where to mail the cheque. 🙂
More seriously — I agree with David that attention has some inherent value (it’s nice to be paid attention to by the right sort of people), but for most of us a big chunk of its value is still as a means to another end.
Ah, you guys are just getting old and practical! 🙂 (I’d like to think I’m only getting one of those two!)
Seriously, the more I think about this, I see that the web is showing us how people crave attention sometimes even more than dollars.
E.g. check out the widget popularity statistics that I compiled last weekend. I find it interesting that people use analytics widgets more than 2-1 over advertising widgets.
And to do some amateur evolutionary biologizing, it’s clear that reproductive success has high value (if not the highest) and that this is only partly correlated with wealth. I mean, look at MySpace, look at high school; money is only one differentiating factor. You want friends, you want to be popular, you want to get laid. I’m not so sure things are so different for the grownups.
screw the attention – that just creates another bigger set of problems… give me just enough funds where i can hang out with MY FAMILY and friends, have a house in the hills – just a tad smaller than this one – maybe the size of the garage 😉 – ride my bike, and build cool software that i can and want to use and stay as far under the radar as possible.
attention is for the egocentric – i’ll take the million +/-
btw, i rode past that house (i think) last saturday on my bike w/ my buddies cary and matson on our trek up to wondervu, to peak to peak, and over to ward. that’s all the attention i need.