Diogenes and The Man are having a crash course in economics courtesy of the banker buddy, ranging from Adam Smith to Thomas Sowell by way of the Austrian School and ‘supply shock’ chaos theory.
But by far the most attention-grabbing are the four riders: Fakenomics, Sloponomics, AI-conomics, and Attention Economics, all of which resonate closer to home.
The banker buddy’s course notes define them thus: Fakenomics: economic claims that are false, misleading, or selectively framed to serve political, financial, or ideological ends.
This is not new — propaganda around inflation, GDP, or employment has existed for decades — but the scale and impact have changed. Governments, corporations, and commentators can cherry-pick indicators, redefine metrics, or lean on opaque statistical adjustments. The result is a ‘managed perception’ of reality: growth that feels stagnant, faux stability that masks fragility, or crises that are downplayed until unavoidable.
Sloponomics, A term coined by The Economist, describes the steep decline of economics punditry due to the Internet. Think low-effort analysis, recycled talking points, shallow ‘explainers’, and pseudo-expertise.
Speed beats accuracy, volume beats depth. Social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and even some online mainstream media reward output over rigour.
The result is ‘slop’, a fog of half-understood concepts — on debt, interest rates, productivity, you name it — presented with unwarranted confidence. And Sloponomics doesn’t have to be intentionally false; it’s often just careless, derivative, and noisy.
AI-conomics: This is both a subject and a mechanism. On one level, it refers to the economics of AI itself — labour displacement, capital concentration, and new monopolistic dynamics.
But it also describes how AI systems (including chatbots) now produce economic narratives. These systems can scale content generation hugely, while inheriting biases from training data and incentives from their deployers. They can also amplify Fakenomics or accelerate Sloponomics by generating plausible-sounding but shallow or incorrect analysis on an industrial scale.
Attention Economics: The underlying engine. An attention-deficit system in which the scarce resource is not capital or labour, but human focus. Think dumbing down… Platforms optimise for engagement — clicks, watch time, shares — not truth. Economic content that is dramatic, simplified, or emotionally charged outcompetes nuanced, data-heavy analysis.
This creates a selection bias, since the most visible economic narratives are often the least accurate. This distorts public understanding and can even feed back into policy decisions, as politicians respond to the narratives that gain traction rather than those grounded in evidence.
How they interact, Attention Economics drives the system. It rewards visibility over accuracy. That produces Sloponomics — cheap, fast, low-quality online content. Within that noise, Fakenomics spreads easily, either deliberately or by accident. AI-conomics then scales the entire process, automating skewed insights and distortions.
The net effect, says the banker buddy, is not just misinformation but epistemic instability — people lose confidence in economic ‘factoids’ altogether. Which has real consequences, because market behaviour, voting patterns, and policy legitimacy all depend on some shared baseline of reality.
And the real reality, he says, is not a light at the end of the tunnel but the proverbial driverless train that won’t stop until it hits the buffers or runs out of steam. Either way, not an enticing prospect…