Allocate Quotes

(to British TV interviewer David Dimbleby after Dimbleby persisted in questioning him about the Monica Lewinsky incident) Look how much time you spent asking me these questions. And that`s why people like you always help the far right because you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about how bad people are and all their personal failings. Look - you made a decision to allocate your time in a certain way. You should take responsibility for that. You should say "Yes, I care much more about this (the Lewinsky affair) than whether the Bosnian people were saved, than whether 27 million people had jobs at the end, and whether we moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty as (Ronald Reagan) and George W. Bush]." This is what I care about."

Governments allocate enormous resources for social programs. And it is true that for many years we have had one of the best social service systems in the world. Yet we are still incapable of meeting the needs of tens of thousands of Canadian families.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.