By: Ahmad “Jordan” Al-Zu'Bi
Jordan Daily - In my first article on King Abdullah II's address to the 81st United Nations General Assembly, I argued that the speech begins with the economics of attention and ends with the economics of trust. A subsequent exchange with Dr. Sri Ramamoorti, particularly around his work on the Velocity of Risk, pushed me toward a harder question: if information has never been more abundant and warning signals more visible, why does the international system still so often act after risks have become crises?
Herbert Simon's work on attention scarcity provides part of the answer. Ramamoorti's work on the velocity of risk provides another. Put alongside King Abdullah's speech, they reveal a deeper problem. I call it the Attention–Risk Gap: the gap between the speed at which risks emerge and propagate and the speed at which institutions recognise them, allocate and sustain attention, make decisions and act.
We Have Never Known More. Why Do We Still Act Too Late?
King Abdullah captured the paradox in one sentence: “History rarely catches us entirely by surprise. More often, it catches us focused elsewhere.”
Governments possess intelligence. Markets generate signals. Satellites observe developments across borders. Journalists and humanitarian organisations document emerging crises. Smartphones can place a war or disaster in our hands almost as it happens. Yet seeing risk is not the same as governing it.
The paradox of the information age may be that humanity has become extraordinarily good at detecting risk while remaining remarkably inconsistent at acting before it compounds. The problem is increasingly not whether warning signals exist, but whether institutions can distinguish what matters, keep it on the agenda and respond while the risk remains manageable.
The Attention–Risk Gap
“Attention has become a scarce asset,” King Abdullah told the General Assembly. In that chamber, he added, attention is “more than a cognitive resource. It is a geopolitical one.”
More than half a century earlier, Nobel laureate in economics Herbert Simon identified the underlying economic problem. Information consumes attention. As information becomes abundant, attention becomes scarce, creating an allocation problem: which signals deserve the limited attention of decision-makers?
Geopolitics makes Simon's problem harder because institutions are allocating scarce attention while risks themselves are moving.
This is the Attention–Risk Gap. Its size depends not only on how quickly risk travels, but also on how efficiently institutions move information through attention, decision and action. When that gap becomes sufficiently wide, institutions cross from ex-ante risk management, managing risk before losses materialise, into ex-post crisis management after they do.
That distinction matters. Risk management asks how to reduce the probability or severity of tomorrow's loss. Crisis management asks how to absorb today's. The wider the Attention–Risk Gap, the more likely we are to end up doing the latter.
Attention Can Fail at Three Gates
King Abdullah's speech suggests that geopolitical attention can fail at three distinct gates: allocation, persistence and conversion.
First comes allocation. Which conflict reaches the agenda? As the King observed, geopolitical attention helps determine “which conflicts receive sustained diplomacy and which fade from the agenda.”
Then comes persistence. A crisis can capture global attention without keeping it. Cameras arrive, headlines dominate and political pressure rises, until another emergency takes its place. The King's question is whether “our attention lasts long enough to act.”
Finally comes conversion. Attention can be abundant and persistent while producing little institutional response. Later in the speech, discussing Gaza and the West Bank, the King asks the decisive question: “will we act?”
A crisis can therefore be overlooked, noticed and then forgotten, or remain visible without attention ever becoming action. The last is perhaps the most troubling because information and attention are already present. What has failed is their conversion into action.
Risk Is Getting Faster. Governance Is Not.
This is where Ramamoorti's work on the Velocity of Risk becomes particularly relevant. With James Wanserski and Richard Stover, he examined how the interval between a risk event and its financial or reputational consequences can compress dramatically in an almost instantaneous information environment.
The geopolitical implication is important. Risk does not wait for institutions to finish deliberating. Information crosses borders almost instantaneously; markets can reprice expectations within minutes; capital moves rapidly; and narratives can spread globally before governments agree on how to respond.
Institutional decision-making operates differently. Diplomacy requires negotiation, coalitions take time to construct, governments face domestic constraints, and multilateral action must navigate rules, interests and veto points.
For Jordan, this is not abstract. King Abdullah describes a region where “one crisis arrives before the last has receded.” Governing risk therefore means responding to today's shock without allowing it to consume the attention needed for tomorrow's.
The New Era of Risk may therefore be defined not simply by the number of risks we face, but by a widening mismatch between the velocity of risk and the velocity of governance. When risk moves faster than governance, delay itself becomes a source of risk.
When Attention Becomes Political, Scarcity Becomes Power
Scarcity always raises an allocation question: who gets what, when and why? Attention is no different.
Who decides which warning signals trigger action? Which conflicts remain on the diplomatic agenda? Which violations produce consequences? Who bears the cost of intervention, and who bears the cost of inaction?
King Abdullah pushes directly into this territory. Discussing Israel, he argues that political inaction is “not for lack of options,” pointing to sanctions, asset freezes, embargoes and diplomatic isolation as instruments used elsewhere, while arguing that the response in this case has been different.
Whatever one's assessment of that political charge, it raises a deeper political-economy question. If information, attention and policy instruments all exist, yet action differs across cases, information scarcity cannot fully explain the outcome. The constraint lies somewhere in converting attention into action.
That conversion is shaped by alliances, veto power, domestic politics, economic interests and institutional rules. This is where scarcity becomes power: actors with greater influence over institutional agendas also influence which risks receive scarce attention and which are converted into action. Attention is scarce, but its allocation is not politically neutral.
Information-Rich. Attention-Poor. Institutionally Slow.
Simon gives us scarcity. Ramamoorti and his colleagues give us velocity. King Abdullah gives us the geopolitical problem: what receives attention, whether that attention persists, and whether it ultimately becomes action. The Attention–Risk Gap connects the three.
We can now watch risks develop almost in real time while relying on institutions whose attention, incentives and decision processes operate at a different speed.
And once the velocity of risk overtakes the velocity of institutional response, the bill changes. Prevention gives way to emergency response; risk management gives way to crisis management; and resources that might have reduced an exposure are instead spent absorbing its consequences.
Perhaps the defining governance failure of the information age will therefore not be ignorance. It will be informed inaction.
The Most Dangerous Risks May Be the Ones We Already See
King Abdullah closes his address with a warning: “The future is shaped not only by what we do, but by what we choose to ignore.”
In an information-rich world, however, ignoring no longer necessarily means not knowing. We can know and fail to prioritise. We can prioritise and fail to sustain attention. We can sustain attention and still fail to act.
The most dangerous risks of the New Era of Risk may therefore not be the ones we fail to see. They may be the ones we see clearly, discuss endlessly and still allow to move faster than our institutions can respond.
That is the Attention–Risk Gap. Closing it may be one of the defining governance challenges of our time.
