"So everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it, and get it incorporated into prices"
About this Quote
Markets, in Miller's telling, are less a casino than a computational device: a sprawling, ruthless spreadsheet where millions of partial truths get forced into a single number. The elegance of the line is how it turns a moralized arena ("greed", "speculation") into an epistemic one. Prices are not just what things cost; they are what we currently believe, collectively, about the future. That shift matters because it defends markets with a claim about knowledge, not virtue.
The phrasing does quiet ideological work. "So everybody has some information" grants humility and disperses authority; no planner, CEO, or regulator gets to pretend they hold the master key. "Aggregate" implies a neutral mechanism, but "evaluate" smuggles in contest and discipline: markets don't merely collect facts, they punish bad inferences. If you are wrong, you don't lose an argument, you lose money. "Get it incorporated" suggests inevitability, as if information naturally sinks into prices the way dye saturates water.
Context is late-20th-century financial economics, when the Efficient Market Hypothesis and modern corporate finance were remaking how academics and policymakers justified deregulation, passive investing, and skepticism toward stock-picking mystique. Miller, a Nobel laureate and EMH-adjacent thinker, is articulating the era's big confidence: that decentralized trade can outperform centralized judgment.
The subtext, of course, is the boundary case: what if information is asymmetric, manipulated, or slow to travel? The quote works because it is both a promise and a provocation: if prices are knowledge, then bubbles, crashes, and fraud aren't just market failures - they're epistemic failures, moments when the machine misreads reality.
The phrasing does quiet ideological work. "So everybody has some information" grants humility and disperses authority; no planner, CEO, or regulator gets to pretend they hold the master key. "Aggregate" implies a neutral mechanism, but "evaluate" smuggles in contest and discipline: markets don't merely collect facts, they punish bad inferences. If you are wrong, you don't lose an argument, you lose money. "Get it incorporated" suggests inevitability, as if information naturally sinks into prices the way dye saturates water.
Context is late-20th-century financial economics, when the Efficient Market Hypothesis and modern corporate finance were remaking how academics and policymakers justified deregulation, passive investing, and skepticism toward stock-picking mystique. Miller, a Nobel laureate and EMH-adjacent thinker, is articulating the era's big confidence: that decentralized trade can outperform centralized judgment.
The subtext, of course, is the boundary case: what if information is asymmetric, manipulated, or slow to travel? The quote works because it is both a promise and a provocation: if prices are knowledge, then bubbles, crashes, and fraud aren't just market failures - they're epistemic failures, moments when the machine misreads reality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
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