Georg Franck built the best attention-economy framework yet remains unknown outside Germany.

Evidence

It is in the middle of the 1990s, however, that the attention economy really takes off. The honours go to the philosopher and architect Georg Franck for having developed, in a series of articles begun in 1989 and then collected into a seminal work published in 1998, the first (and no doubt still the best) analytical framework for this new field. While Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman received Nobel prizes for their work in economics in 1978 and 2002 respectively, Georg Franck’s conceptual work remains largely unknown outside Germany, and the more superficial, virally disseminated, interventions of Michael Goldhaber have since 1996 been considered responsible for launching the public debate on a ‘new economy’ whose principal scarcity is attention rather than the traditional elements of production. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 36

Categorization

• QUESTION: Who is Georg Franck and what is in his 1998 framework? His obscurity compared to Goldhaber’s viral fame is itself a case study in the economics he theorized.
• XREF: This mirrors the pattern in Communication as Culture and The Bias of Communication where the substantive theorist (Innis) is overshadowed by the popularizer (McLuhan).