The Bezzle

In The Great Crash 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith observed a peculiar property of economic booms: at any given moment there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement, a stock of apparent value that exists in one party's accounts but has already been removed from another's. He named this inventory the bezzle. Its defining quality is that it grows silently in good times, when scrutiny relaxes and confidence is high, and shrinks violently in bad times, when scrutiny returns and the gap between claim and reality collapses at once. During the boom, both the embezzler and the victim feel richer; the sum of apparent wealth is inflated by exactly the size of the bezzle. When the crash comes, the bezzle is discovered and the apparent wealth evaporates. Applied to any technology boom—and most precisely to large language models—the concept illuminates the inventory of overstated capabilities, exaggerated benchmarks, demonstrations that do not generalize, and revenues projected but not