With Greenspan’s death at age one hundred on June 22, attention has returned to Greenspan’s role in shaping modern capitalism. His acknowledgment of a flaw in his ideology, made in testimony before Congress in October of 2008, serves as a handy tentpole for retrospectives on his career, contrasting his dogmatic faith in free markets with the messier economic reality.
But Greenspan’s career has a great deal more to tell us than a mere repetition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s warning that “theory is grey, but the tree of life is ever green.” Indeed, as some of his more perceptive critics have observed, Greenspan hardly ever let himself be constrained by ideological consistency, blithely changing his tune as the occasion demanded. As an economist, he was (to his credit) far more of an empiricist than has often been appreciated.
Greenspan was no abstruse theoretician. What he was instead was far worse. Throughout his career, he maintained a steadfast commitment to serving the powerful and plundering the powerless. He was a leading organizer of the war on the American working class over the last fifty years. It is this devotion to the interests of the ownership class that forms the true through line of Greenspan’s career.
At the Feet of the Master
Greenspan began his economics career at New York University in the 1940s. As a student, he had a reputation as a prickly individualist, but not a particularly ideological one. After receiving a BA in economics, he went to work as a researcher for the Conference Board, one of corporate America’s premier think tanks. Founded in 1916, the group emerged after World War II as one the leading policy planning organizations for the new corporate elite. Greenspan distinguished himself with his research at the group and soon became an in-demand corporate consultant.
At the same time, Greenspan was introduced by his first wife to Ayn Rand. Rand had built up a circle of acolytes around Washington Square in these years and hosted a kind of philosophical salon–cum–cult of personality out of her apartment. Greenspan was invigorated by Rand’s philosophical self-confidence and soon emerged as a devotee of her idiosyncratic brand of libertarianism. His first piece of political writing was a letter to the New York Times defending Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged from a hostile reviewer.
Alan Greenspan was a leading organizer of the war on the American working class over the last fifty years.