Blogging news and economic ironies ... I'm currently in the process of shifting this blog over to another platform and a new domain. Working out the kinks and details will probably take a fair amount of time, so if I don't say much over the next few days, that would be why.

In the meantime, here's an interesting profile of arguably the most influential and least understood man of the last twenty years: Alan Greenspan. The most fascinating part, I thought, was Greenspan's private comment in 1999 that "We really do not know how this system works ... It's clearly new. The old models just are not working."

What's so intriguing to me about that comment is not so much his professed uncertainty, but the fact that he professed it privately. That he deliberately refrained from airing publicly his personal doubts underscores one of the more interesting paradoxes of a modern economy: the fact that it demands both the appearance of centralized control, however limited, and an actual structure that is deeply decentralized and non-determinative. Why that should have to be the case, and the social and political consequences it causes, are subjects for another time. But interesting to ponder for now.