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4 BOOK
REVIEW Reaping what is
sown The Age of Turbulence
by Alan
Greenspan
Reviewed by Julian
Delasantellis
I don't know his name, and I
don't even know if he still walks the earth, but,
somewhere, probably in Europe, there once walked a
man who I feel was the smartest man on earth. I do
know that the man is not former chairman of the
United States Federal Reserve Board, Alan
Greenspan, whose autobiography was published in
September.
I think it
was about 1990. I was in a college library,
because it was back in that dark age you still had
to actually go to a place other than your den to
read scholarly journals.
I don't remember
the journal's name, so, of course I don't know the
volume number or title of the piece that made such
an impact on me. I do know that it was one of
those European journals of left-wing political and
Marxist thought. You know, the kind that students at the
London School of Economics or Ecole Polytechnique
in Paris read and discuss over their coffee and
Gauloises. (Actor and film producer Woody Allen
once told the best joke regarding left-wing
political magazines; he talked of the liberal
magazines Commentary and Dissent merging to
operate under the masthead Dysentery.)
In
this magazine, an academic was being interviewed
about what he thought of the recent fall of the
Berlin Wall. The rest of the world was justifiably
jubilant, but this academic, whom I will call
Professor Brain, was a bit cautious.
As I
remember, Brain's apprehension was centered around
his contention that, with the communist threat no
longer stalking the corporate suites of the
capitalist world, the capitalists would no longer
be under any restraint to throw off the shackles
that had been inhibiting them from a total
campaign of rape and pillage of the middle and
working classes of the capitalist world, indeed,
of the entire planet.
Brain's argument was
that, during the Cold War, the governments of the
capitalist world tamped down on the most
avaricious impulses of their ruling class because
of fears that the ensuing social dislocations,
poverty and unemployment could have been exploited
to further the interests of the communist bloc.
This was basically why the US allowed much
of Western Europe to go social democratic after
World War II, so the experience of the interwar
period, with the Great Depression leading to the
rise of Nazism, would not be repeated. (This
reason, keeping the population content, was also
why the post-war Soviet Union allowed some limited
applications of free market capitalism, first by
not nationalizing Polish agriculture, then with
consumer "goulash" communism in Hungary after the
1956 invasion.)
Brain's thesis made quite
an impression on me, although not so great an
impression as to allow me to remember his name.
Seventeen years later my curiosity about Brain's
theory has grown to become absolute awe and
adoration; what the professor said would happen is
precisely what has happened.
Being in the
investment game, you live or die by your
predictions, your "calls", and Brain's call was,
and is, the most stunningly perspicacious I've
ever heard. I see him, whoever he is or was, as
something of a modern day Nietzschean hero, a man
who looked above the din and confusion of everyday
life to see the broad sweeping historical
spectacle of the human condition.
As
opposed to Greenspan. His book in no way evokes
Nietzsche, it reads more like a sales manager
reporting the quarter's results to the home
office.
Greenspan was born in New York in
1926, and like many autobiographies of people from
his city and generation, the early chapters of the
book are wistful stories of growing up taking the
subway, of following the Yankee and Giants (since
1956 the San Francisco Giants) baseball clubs, and
playing sax in the city's jazz clubs. After
reading many such accounts of long ago New York
childhoods, I sometimes think they all can be
grouped under a common chapter title - "Growing Up
in New York Sure Was Great Before the Blacks Moved
Here".
There's a chapter on his
idolization, perhaps obsession, with Russian-born
American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand; one
wonders if his current wife, NBC News
correspondent Andrea Mitchell, looks at her books
in their library and feels much the same way a
wife would feel on discovering that her husband
had kept steamy love letters from his previous
paramour.
There are chapters on working
for presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; he
admired the intelligence of the former and the
character of the latter, just like the rest of the
country. He saved the financial markets in the
crash of 1987, but, hey, it was nothing.
As should be expected in a book intended
for an American audience, there is frustratingly
little concerning the international aspects of the
Greenspan era, and that is the most disappointing
feature of this 544-page tome. When, two years
into his first term, the Berlin Wall fell and
every other model of economic societal
organization other than free market capitalism
fell into disfavor, or just disappeared, Greenspan
became something far greater than just the 13th
chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of
Governors. He became the public face of, and
far and away the most important single personage
representing, the triumphal capitalist revolution
that would come to rule the planet. Over every
financial and goods market on earth, as Cassius
described Julius Caesar, Greenspan "doth bestride
the narrow world like a colossus".
Greenspan writes of a trip he undertook to
Moscow a few months before the fall of the wall.
The purpose was to elaborate on the workings of
capitalist central banking to an audience of
Russian central bankers who had little experience
with the concept, but the chapter reads more like
the employees of a company under new ownership
being told to shape up by the new bosses.
"I looked out at the 100 or so people
assembled before me at Spaso House [the official
Moscow residence of the US ambassador to the
Soviet Union] and wondered. What are they
thinking? How can I reach them? They were all
products of Soviet schools, I assumed, and deeply
indoctrinated with Marxism. What did they know of
capitalist institutions or market capitalism?"
It's not quite as brutal as American actor
Alec Baldwin's famous pitiless soliloquy in the
1992 film version of Glengarry Glen Ross,
where he motivates three realtors by humiliating,
belittling and then firing them, but, for the
people of what would become the former Soviet
Union, who, over the next few years would be
thrown into hunger and penury as their previous
economic production and distribution system was
obliterated in favor of the sudden free market
"shock treatment" imposed on them by the West,
they may not have noticed much of a difference.
Rand died seven years before the fall of
the wall, and Greenspan includes in the Russia
chapter wistful wishing that she had lived to see
the collapse of the economic system that so
represented the antithesis of her
ultra-libertarian views.
It was in the
fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent
triumphant spread of market capitalism to the four
corners of the world, that
Head
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students at the
London School of Economics or Ecole Polytechnique
in Paris read and discuss over their coffee and
Gauloises. (Actor and film producer Woody Allen
once told the best joke regarding left-wing
political magazines; he talked of the liberal
magazines Commentary and Dissent merging to
operate under the masthead Dysentery.) 
