Nobody knows anything

We’re not convinced that this is the whole of the truth, the entirety, but let’s go with this as a working assumption:

Venture capitalists are clueless – the likes of Klarna and Uber prove it

As values crash, it's becoming clear that many VC firms simply got lucky once and have coasted ever since

Having the clueless spraying around societal resources doesn’t sound like all that good an idea if we’re honest about it. It would also seem to be a verification of William Goldman’s line, “Nobody knows anything.” Which also leads to the follow up “not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work”.

We are willing to agree, entirely, with that second version of the point. Also, to believe it about the wider society and economy. Varied people might have some ideas of what might happen, try to position themselves to take advantage of it, but no one is certain about what will work.

But if having the VCs spraying those resources around isn’t entirely optimal then of course this suggests that some different method will do better. Which is where those economic planners make their entry. If we use the very bright people - those Rolls Royce minds - who populate the Civil Service (and, to be even more ludicrous, the less RR minds that constitute politics) to decide upon what everyone else must do then resources won’t get wasted, will they?

Except, of course, the entire point of planning is that there will only be the one way that anything gets done. But we’ve all just agreed that no one knows what will work. So deciding upon just the one way takes us further away from other discovery of any of the ways that might work. For we’ve concentrated the decision down onto the one single method which is no more - or to be fair, less - likely to work than any other.

The VCs directing matters from Mayfair isn’t, we’re aware, all that appealing. There are those who would prefer the Civil Service to be doing it just down the road in Whitehall.

But the actual point here is that VCs is plural, meaning many experiments, “the” Civil Service is singular, meaning just the one essay at an attempt. And in the fog of ignorance which system is more likely to luck into something that works? The one with multiple attempts of course.

Or, as has been pointed out more formally before, markets are the way in which we experiment to find out what works, something that planning doesn’t do nor even allow.

All of this long before we consider whether today’s Civil Service or politics does in fact contain the Rolls Royce minds of our generation where finance does not. We ourselves know large numbers of people in both of those sectors, we’d need more than just a certain amount of convincing of that contention.