Alternative alternative investments -- of attention?

Investing Attention Essential to Viable Growth (Part #6)

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The financial community distinguishes alternative investment strategies (liquid alternatives, "liquid alts") that are available through alternative investment vehicles such as mutual funds, ETFs, closed-end funds, etc. that provide daily liquidity.

The above distinctions clearly exclude other forms of investment through their very particular focus in terms of economic and financial preoccupations. This recalls the controversies over whether a householder (especially a wife) could be understood as "working" -- or might be better defined as "unemployed". It excludes any investment in the family and other "non-economic" activities -- possibly even "non-profit" activity whether or not financially remunerated. This raises issues with respect to bodies declared to be nonprofit, even though their significant objective may be to enable policy-making by their members (eg trade associations, many professional bodies, etc).

This impoverished framing also avoids issues regarding how those variously institutionalized (prisoners, students, military, etc) are to be understood as "working" -- to say nothing of the myriad plants and animals of the biosphere.

A case can of course then be made for also recognizing investment of attention in:

Possible arenas for investment of attention
Artefacts	Relationships / People	Activities / Practices	Ideas / Beliefs
nature land house design / clothes collectibles art books	contacts partner / spouse friends children pets community network extra-martial affairs status / image	play / gambling charitable activity prayer hobbies sport music / song / dance gardening shopping	emotional / sentimental philosophical religious cognitive psychological

With investment understood as the allocation of resources, of particular interest is the investment of energy as the most fundamental resource -- interpreted more generally to include its psychosocial variants, as separately discussed (Reframing Sustainable Sources of Energy for the Future: the vital role of psychosocial variants, 2006). Again there is the question of what engenders boredom and the disinvestment process.

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