Library/Biography & Memoir/The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

Cover of The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

Sebastian Mallaby

Mallaby uses Greenspan's life to explore central banking, ideology, markets, and the difficult boundary between technocratic judgment and historical contingency.

What stuck

  • Central banking is part economics, part judgment, and part historical luck.
  • Technocratic authority works best when it remembers how much it still cannot know.