The Attention Economy and Young People

Economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value). Today, information is abundant, attention is scarce. The scale of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention. The most recent example: American Eagle added $200 million in market cap overnight, not by increasing sales or lowering costs, but by hacking the attention economy with a Sydney Sweeney ad calibrated for the culture war’s choose-your-own-narrative ecosystem. The stock popped another 20% after President Trump praised the ad on his social media platform. Sydney Sweeney doesn’t have great jeans, or genes, but great memes. 

Few people understand attention economy dynamics better than Kyla Scanlon. She captured, monetized, and continues to hold my attention on TikTok. (Where else?) She’s a frequent guest on Prof G Markets — listen here for Kyla’s American Eagle take — and the author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. Kyla coined the term “vibecession” to explain the disconnect between the strong fundamentals and gloomy outlook of the Biden economy. This week, I asked her to write about how the attention economy affects young people.

The Attention Economy and Young People

by Kyla Scanlon

We’re all living through a time of immense change. The news cycle is whiplash-inducing, frameworks are being broken, and everything feels unmoored. 

Last year on the road talking about my book, In This Economy?, I heard one common thread: worry. A generation-shaping worry. CEOs are worried about their businesses, manufacturers about tariffs, and young people about everything — from identity to employment to whether the world they’re inheriting even makes sense.

Young people today face a triple disruption: technological creative destruction through AI and algorithmic systems, plus political and economic upheaval through tariffs and increasing fiscal uncertainty. While every generation has faced challenges, today’s young people confront a massive reckoning between technology, economic opportunity, and personal identity.

Across the U.S., young people tell me the same thing: They’re worried about jobs, but more important, they question whether the concept of a “career” will even exist in five years. They’re graduating into a Great Uncertainty, where traditional pathways to security are disappearing, affecting how they think about their entire economic future — from employment to homeownership to marriage to having kids.

To understand what’s happening, we need to understand two things: the attention economy and the real economy. But let me start with a very surreal moment that crystallized everything for me. 

Trumpcoin: The Defining Moment of 2025

Late Friday night, on January 17, 2025, Donald Trump launched a memecoin. By Sunday — a mere three days later! — Trump and his team had generated $60 billion in paper wealth from pure narrative value. By Monday, Inauguration Day, he was both president again and one of the world’s richest individuals, entirely through attention-based speculation. The coin officially “has nothing to do with any political campaign or office” (or so they say), but its success came precisely because it’s associated with him.

I believe this moment cemented our final step in the transition into the attention economy. The president of the United States bypassed every traditional wealth-creation mechanism and generated more money in 36 hours than most companies create in decades. All through attention and narrative.

Historically, value creation followed a clear progression: 

1. Capture attention with a quality product (Apple’s iPhone), then convert that attention to business improvement (reinvestment or share buybacks).
2. Build better products, generating real cash flow and compounding value over time. This was the Warren Buffett playbook — attention as a means to an end, with cash flow and tangible assets at its core.

Trumpcoin skipped the middle steps entirely:

1. Capture attention.
2. Convert directly into value. 

Attention is truly all you need. Attention became the product, the business improvement, the way to compound wealth. It worked with immense speed, because Trump controls political positioning (executive power, regulatory influence); platforms (narrative shaping via Truth Social); and now token wealth (instant value creation through pure narrative).

This was the birth of the Attention Singularity, where power, narrative, and wealth merged into one self-reinforcing system. Attention became so dense that it warped reality itself. We’re watching a system where attention directly creates wealth, wealth instantly empowers, power captures more attention, and each cycle gets faster and stronger.

Many young people watched this and thought: Of course this is how the world works now. Of course attention is the ultimate currency. Of course the old rules don’t apply. I have to change everything.

Watching this unfold made me question everything I thought I knew about value creation. (Cue the meme of someone throwing away a copy of the Intelligent Investor.) But it also made me realize we needed to look at the broader ecosystem that made Trumpcoin possible in the first place, because this was the logical conclusion of the system we’ve built.

The New Rules

Four interconnected elements have reshaped our reality:

• Digital Infrastructure: Our mass communication system is privatized and optimized for profit. Billionaires own newspapers, platforms, and the very means of connection. Communication has become an addiction because it has to be! That’s how the big bucks are made.
• The Algorithm Trap: We’ve built our communication infrastructure around engagement metrics rather than knowledge. Attention game winners excel at capturing eyeballs (Mr. Beast, Sydney Sweeney, Joe Rogan, etc.), but aggregated attention rarely equates to societal progress.
• Brainrot: Short-form video has totally changed how we process information. Instead of reading or having deep conversations, we absorb fragments and regurgitate talking points. We’ve drastically lowered our standards for what constitutes being informed.
• The Generation Gap: Among U.S. adults younger than 30, 59% use TikTok. To succeed in business, you must master digital media. Many people now work in social media or marketing — an extremely valuable skill set, but one that’s also frying our brains.

These four elements reinforce one another, forming a digital cage. When narrative production becomes more valuable than actual production, we risk creating a world where attention harvesting matters more than building things. Hence, Trumpcoin.

But young people aren’t just passive victims of this system. They’re responding to it, and their responses are reshaping politics.

The Politics of Disruption

When things are uncertain, people retreat to extremes but also vote for “new normals.” Trump won in 2024 partly by capturing young voters who believed traditional professional paths promising stability might cease to exist soon. Coupled with increased zero-sum thinking, institutional distrust, and attention economy dynamics, young people are trying to find footing in a fundamentally new world.The conservative shift among young voters is about more than politics. When OpenAI’s Sam Altman says AI will require the “whole structure of society to be up for debate and reconfiguration,” the entire nature of the self is being questioned.

Economic Headwinds

The boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, had a somewhat clearish wealth-building formula (broad generalization) and a (seemingly) clearer sense of self:

• Career progression + home appreciation + retirement savings, supported by mostly predictable returns on education. 

This shaped their worldview and understanding of success. Boomers are the wealthiest generation to have ever lived, thanks to affordable housing and strong equity markets. 

The boomer formula worked for many despite disruptions like the stagflation of the 1970s and the mega-high interest rates of the 1980s. But many boomers who benefited from this system have participated in its dismantling through thousands of small decisions prioritizing short-term gains over systemic stability.

Today, boomers own 38% of homes nationwide, despite comprising just over 20% of the population. Millennials haven’t caught up to boomer life markers and homeownership rates. Homeownership rates are even lower for Gen Z than Millennials at the same ages, according to a UC Berkeley study. Meanwhile, 72.9% of wealth is held by people over 55. Millennials and Gen Z own 71% less wealth than their population representation would predict, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Young People’s Response: The Barbell Strategy

These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Taleb’s Barbell Strategy. We increasingly have a world split between young people 1) forgoing college to pursue the trades or 2) gambling everything on digital moon shots. 

Taleb writes that the barbell strategy is a “method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude and an excessively aggressive one at the same time.” Here, we see people doing maybe one or the other. The barbell economy creates its own culture:

• Safety seekers: Those skipping college debt to pursue trades, finding identity in stability amid chaos. The toolbelt generation is choosing steady work over uncertain professional paths.
• Digital gamblers: Those embracing the creator economy, crypto speculation, and AI startup moon shots. Finding identity in potential rather than stability. 

To be clear, a middle path still exists and is evolving. I’m generalizing to make a point. Many people are still going down the traditional road — and rightly so! — albeit with more skepticism. For some, it’s working, especially for those entering healthcare and social services, the only sectors adding jobs currently. Others are trying to bridge the gap between the past and the present with mixed results. 

But as my former professor Dr. Indudeep Chhachhi says, “The opposite of rationality isn’t irrationality — it’s being normal.” When the “safe path” might be eliminated by AI overnight, hypergambling becomes emotionally and economically sensible. Safety seekers are making calculated bets. Digital gamblers are responding to an economy that increasingly rewards exponential outcomes.

Two Paths Forward

I see two possible paths, both requiring us to acknowledge how the game has changed:

• Path One: Platform Reboot. Build platforms optimized for understanding rather than engagement. Create digital spaces that strengthen society rather than fragment it. Develop algorithms that reward depth and critical thinking instead of emotional manipulation. It’s a lot. Is it possible? I’m not sure. But we certainly have to try something new.
• Path Two: Navigation. Teach digital literacy — beyond privacy settings — to understand attention dynamics. Create systems to preserve digital culture independent of any single platform. 

There are policy choices here around technology regulation, wealth transfer mechanisms, platform governance. But spending this year talking to young people across America has convinced me that the deeper challenge isn’t just technical or policy-driven. It’s about something more important: our collective capacity to understand one another across the attention economy’s fault lines.

Young people aren’t broken. They’re adapting to a world that’s fundamentally different from the one their parents knew. But their parents aren’t wrong either for feeling like the ground has shifted beneath their feet. The attention economy has created new forms of value and new pathways to wealth. The old ways of understanding ourselves and one another are straining to keep up.

The attention economy isn’t going anywhere. It’s too powerful, too integrated into how value gets created now. It’s a system, though, and systems can be changed. As historian Howard Zinn wrote: “If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
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P.S. Kyla Scanlon is the author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. After you buy her book, you should subscribe to her newsletter.