The day the typhoon made landfall, I was among the last to know. My attention was elsewhere; only at the door did I discover the buses had stopped, and I walked home pushing my suitcase into the wind. Friends call that focus. I say no — it’s a place where I get a discount. The discount has a technical name; I’ll get to it.
First, the tax. I once noticed something: the poorer a person is, the more of his time goes to taking out the trash, buying household supplies, checking today’s weather. Days filled with these chores leave no room for thinking about the things that actually matter. There is no tax office for this levy, no bill. Everyone pays it anyway. I call it the attention tax.
Economists have studied it. In Scarcity, Mullainathan and Shafir call it a bandwidth tax: how do I make rent this month, my transit card is empty, don’t miss trash day — each one is trivial alone; the trouble is they run like hundreds of background apps and drain your cognitive memory dry. Hence a death spiral: being poor means handling every scrap of life yourself; no intact blocks of mental bandwidth means missing the chances to climb; missing those chances means staying poor. Note the direction: poor people do not choose the errands — the errands collect from them. The cruelest part of this tax is its rate schedule: it falls hardest on those least able to avoid it.
Why I Don’t Pay
Back to the typhoon. I didn’t check the weather — not out of courage, but because I had outsourced that decision: either I don’t care about the risk, or I’ve accumulated enough to cover it. With the bandwidth freed up, the mind can finally run what actually matters. That’s the technical name: bandwidth wealth.
Real luxury is not having someone take out your trash. It’s not knowing that taking out the trash exists as a category of human activity. Would a secretary help? No. A secretary solves execution, not remembering — you first have to remember to ask her to watch the weather for you, and that one act of remembering is already a levy.
So there is exactly one escape: compress the things that need your attention.
Ten Years, Unchanged
My compression is one rule: investing is a thing that stays unchanged for ten years. As long as I get one choice right, I don’t need to change anything for a decade; everything else I could pay attention to is noise. The Fed raising rates, a missed earnings report, an executive selling shares, a war breaking out — these can whip a stock price 5% in a day, but they don’t touch the business itself. They belong to the weather.
At this point someone should object: writing off that many major events as noise sounds awfully comfortable. The objection is half right. The dividing line is not the size of the event but the quality of the business: if the company you study earns returns persistently above its cost of capital, with pricing power and sturdy cash flow, rate hikes really are noise to it. If it’s a fake growth story propped up by low rates and expanded on high debt — rate hikes are not noise; they’re the thing coming to kill it. Noise is not a property of the news. It’s a property of your holdings.
Weather and Climate
So the escape hatch from the attention tax is one slit wide: think through the things that stay true for ten years. There are astonishingly few of them — get them right once, and for ten years you don’t need to watch the tape, or the macro forecast-shaped news. The rest is almost all weather. Weather doesn’t need checking every day.
As for the people timing their lives around transit cards and trash bags — they aren’t lazy. They’re paying a tax nobody can see. On typhoon days, some people must check the weather, because if they don’t, they get soaked. Some don’t need to check — not from luck, but because ten years ago they read the climate right, once.
