Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: Bob Reich complains that when he was in the Clinton administration he never asked Alan Greenspan the questions and never got the answers he wanted to. Now when I was a not very senior Treasury Department official during the Clinton administration, I did get to ask Alan Greenspan the questions that Bob wanted to ask him. And I got answers. You see, every week a bunch of us senior Treasury Department staff would go over to the Federal Reserve for a lunch. (Food quality: 1 out of 10.) And, since about 1/3 of my job was fed watching and such, I went most of the time. And Greenspan was there, maybe 1/5 of the time, if I recall correctly. Sometimes he was quiet. Sometimes he was witty. And sometimes he let what little hair he had down, regarding himself as among, broadly, friends:
Re: land acknowledgements, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland reads an acknowledgement that the land we occupy is the ancestral land of Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples "who lived here since time immemorial", before every performance. It sinks in, gradually, that it's the least that can be done.
Re: Wired Article. It might almost be considered a modern prediction by Cassandra. American hegemony and techno-utopianism were all on the upswing at that point. The NASDAQ dot.com crash, 9/11, Bush recession, financial collapse, and the current problems of pandemics (and outbreaks - Ebola, MERS, SARS) and the now obvious climate crisis were all ahead of us. No one even wanted to think about any problems that might be ahead as anything more than easily coped with disruptions.
This reproduction of Alan Greenspan's thinking strikes me as more DeLong than Greenspan. However, it is both a fair and coherent reconstruction of the Greenspan era.
Re: land acknowledgements, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland reads an acknowledgement that the land we occupy is the ancestral land of Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples "who lived here since time immemorial", before every performance. It sinks in, gradually, that it's the least that can be done.
Re: Wired Article. It might almost be considered a modern prediction by Cassandra. American hegemony and techno-utopianism were all on the upswing at that point. The NASDAQ dot.com crash, 9/11, Bush recession, financial collapse, and the current problems of pandemics (and outbreaks - Ebola, MERS, SARS) and the now obvious climate crisis were all ahead of us. No one even wanted to think about any problems that might be ahead as anything more than easily coped with disruptions.
This reproduction of Alan Greenspan's thinking strikes me as more DeLong than Greenspan. However, it is both a fair and coherent reconstruction of the Greenspan era.