Comments on Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World"

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I recently finished Greenspan’s book, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.” Contemplating the differences between Greenspan and Ayn Rand, I recognize now, even though Ayn Rand spells it out clearly but I never grokked it, is that Greenspan writes and thinks about how people actually behave, Rand writes and thinks about how people ought to behave. She writes about the potential for heroic lives, Greenspan writes about market behavior and voting behavior. It is the voting behavior that is less than rational, but needs to be accounted for to generate government policy.

The lesson for me in this is that I have been frustrated most of my life by expecting other people, especially employees and newscasters, to aspire to living heroically. I can be more patient with the people I meet, friends and neighbors and family.

There are just too many quotable lines from this book, here is a sampling.
Quotes:
"This implies that in a free society governed by the rights and responsibilities of its citizens, the vast majority of transactions must be voluntary which, of necessity, presupposes trust in the word of those with whom we do business --- in almost all cases, strangers." Page 256.
"Reputation and trust ... [are] the core requirements of market capitalism." Page 256.
"... government regulation cannot substitute for individual integrity." Page 256.
"... the problem of central planning in a market economy -- the market will always undermine any attempt at control." Page 62
Quote from Reagan, "Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." Page 87.
"... U.S. Department of Labor and its predecessor since 1888. ... for those households with a third of the nations's average income ... (their spending exceeds income by 30 percent)." Page 270. {This is an example of keeping up with the Jones, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping.... Greenspan notes that the idea was first described in Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class" }


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