Greenspan’s book mixes memoir with economic musings
In 1944, a draft board in downtown Manhattan rejected Alan Greenspan, then a recent high school graduate, for military service because he had a spot on his lung that looked like it might be tuberculosis. So Greenspan, suddenly without a plan for the future, auditioned to play clarinet for trumpeter Henry Jerome’s traveling big band.
He got the job, but he was never a star. Among his fellow musicians he became known as the band’s resident intellectual. Between sets, when they disappeared into the green room, Greenspan read books about business.
The pattern repeated itself after the war ended and he began studying economics at New York University. Classmates focused on the new economic order, but Greenspan was more interested in numbers and equations. “I still had the sideman psychology,” he writes in “The Age of Turbulence.” “I preferred to focus on technical challenges and did not have a macro view.”
His macro view wouldn’t come until the 1950s, when his first wife introduced him to Ayn Rand’s New York salon. Rand — whom he calls “quite plain to look at” but “a stabilizing force in my life” — pushed him to think beyond mathematics and helped turn him into a libertarian.
By the time President Reagan named Greenspan to run the Federal Reserve in 1987, he had already a lived a full, fascinating, Zelig-like life. For years he was the quietly influential man off to the side. With his book he finally lets us know what he was thinking.
It is a surprisingly frank memoir. Large parts are downright entertaining. Its biggest failing is Greenspan’s reluctance to be as forthright and penetrating about himself as he is about others.
The first 250-odd pages are a standard autobiography, and Greenspan confesses that learning to write in the first person was a struggle. This is a struggle he does not quite win — the first half is readable, but it lacks a narrative core.
The second half is a series of meditations on economic issues, like income inequality and China’s rise.
