  The friendship paradox is revisited by considering both local and global
averages of friends. How the economics of attention affects the recruitment of
friends is examined. Statistical implications of varying individual attentions
are investigated and it is argued that this is one reason why the mean of
friends is higher than the median in social networks. The distribution of
friends skews to the right for two other reasons: (i) the presence of
institutional nodes that increase the mean; and (ii) the dormancy of many of
the nodes. The difference between friends and friends of friends is a measure
of the structural information about the network.
