The empathy budget is borrowed from economics, and like most such metaphors it presents scarcity as natural. A budget presupposes a fixed sum and unavoidable trade-offs, and that framing has diagnostic power: the page-share audit and the admission rule could not exist without it. It also imports an assumption that much fiction refutes. War and Peace grants interiority to a great many people, including a boy the reader enters on the night before his death, and on the budget model this is profligate; on the page it produces a sense that the world is full of people whose insides are as crowded as the reader’s own. The scarcity belongs to a form, the realist novel with its protagonist convention, and forms without that convention distribute attention on other principles. Nor is attention simply conserved: a reader shown that Casaubon has an inside does not care less about Dorothea, but differently, because Dorothea now stands next to someone.
What the model does reliably is turn a vague dissatisfaction into a specific question. This book feels thin becomes five vantages hold equal shares and none has a knowledge boundary, or this grant serves access only, or the one character whose motives are never available is the one the plot needs to be wrong, and specific questions can be answered. It cannot measure worth, since every empirical source it rests on measures comprehension and response. What remains, once the tests are run, is the argument the allocation makes about whose experience the book treats as fully real, and that argument is the writer’s to choose. The household novel’s choice, two sisters inside, a brother entered once and the mother never, is defensible only because the writer can say what the mother’s exclusion is for, and a manuscript whose writer cannot say that about its own outsiders has an allocation it has not yet decided.