bleongcw's Reviews

The long awaited memoir entitled "The Age of Turbulence: Adventure in a New World" by Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board appointed by US President, Ronald Reagan, is finally out.

For a memoir, it is definitely well written and interesting that gets me hooked for a few days. For that matter, even the way the description of his first date with his current wife, Andrea Mitchell, a foreign correspondent from MSNBC was amazing. Imagine that Alan Greenspan brought his girlfriend for a first date back home and charmed her with his own essay about anti-trust for Ayn Rand. I doubt that many of us can do that. Of course, that small snippet in the book is not what makes it interesting. I also respectfully disagree with Bob Novak's assessment of his book in Bloomberg's Political Capital with Al Hunt, where he said that it did not appear to him that it was a memoir. From reading the book, Greenspan followed the standard autobiographical approach, with the backdrop of September 11, which he thought was the event that changed the world, then started moving the clock back to his childhood, his training as an economist and subsequently, his job as the Fed Chairman.

In Alan Greenspan's world, he relied on the use of formal mathematical models coupled with a set of assumptions that can be identified with data and issue-specific. It does offer us a glimpse on how he sets up his analysis of the world for his career later. For those who don't know, Greenspan is one of the followers of the Wittgenstein school of logical positivism. It was till the part when he was offered the job of Fed Chairman, the book shifted gears and you start to feel the action going from there to the end. Here is the part which I do not want to spoil the reader and leave you to discover why this book has taught me more than what I expected on the US economy and the forces of globalization. Till the end, Greenspan offered his own delphic vision of the future and parted with an interesting note that the predictions he made may go wrong. He correctly noted that in the end, it is the human perseverance and ability to adapt that will be able to solve the problems of that time.

For long version of the review "link name":http://bleongcw.typepad.com/simple_is_the_reason_of_m/2007/09/the-age-of-turb.html (read less)