Cover — The Price of Thinking

I have released a short book: The Price of Thinking — AI, explained by economics. It is free to read online, and short enough to finish in a couple of evenings.

The premise is simple. Computer science can explain how a large language model works — roughly, a machine for predicting the next word — but not why that should reorganise the world’s capital spending. Whether half a trillion dollars a year is a sensible response to a chatbot is not a question about software. It is a question about prices, inputs, competition and expected returns. The tools that answer it are the ones taught in any first economics course: supply and demand, production, cost, market structure, externalities. They were built to explain steam, electricity and computing, and they explain this too.

The book has fifteen chapters. Each opens with one concrete puzzle from the news — why the spending looks mad, why every firm races, why jobs unbundle into tasks — and resolves it with one economic tool. Each ends with a “What to watch” list of indicators you can check yourself, and a “Dig deeper” list of sources, so you can test the claims rather than take them on trust. The time-sensitive numbers are marked “as of mid-2026” and will date; the way of thinking, I believe, will not.

One more thing, in the spirit of the subject: the book was written with substantial AI assistance, under my direction and editorial control. A book arguing that the price of thinking has collapsed would be a strange place to pretend otherwise. The full disclosure is in the front matter.

Start with chapter one, or browse the full contents.