Benedict Evans

It's telling people what's wanted.

It's not just a signal of worth.

It's a signal of demand.

There's a fascinating book I read a while ago called Red Plenty, which is about Soviet central planning in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

And it's about sort of what happens when you have a central planning that just cannot cope with the level of complexity of a sophisticated economy in the 60s and 70s, as opposed to let's make grain and tractors and locomotives in the 20s and 30s and steel, which already kind of works.

But once you actually have a sophisticated industrial economy, central planning can't handle the complexity.

And so you try and create incentives and structures around that while not having pricing.

And that just doesn't work.

I suppose there's a sort of a generalized point, which is like a market economy is a system.

And if you pull a lever here, something will move there.

And you can't just pull a lever here and say, well, I don't want that to move because it's a democracy.

It will move anyway.

And so you have to understand how the system works and understand what consequences you want from that and what your parameters are within this.

It's funny, I have a draft thinking about what LLM is due to web search and publishing and discovery in e-commerce and big hand wavy fuzzy, all of that stuff.

And I was sort of thinking about this and there's a book written by a French academic sort of 20 years ago or something called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

which sounds very kind of snide.

But kind of his point is that, like, there's the book you read when you were 17 and you really didn't get it.

And if you read it now, you'd get it.

And there's a book that, like, he's got this kind of list of, like, there's the books that everybody else has read, so it's as though you've read them.

There's the books that, like, you've read three other books by that writer, so you don't really need to read this one, too.