The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

For anyone who is fascinated by how smart people continue to grow their creative analytical skills, this book is a treasure. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, for much of his career details how his mind developed from an intuition for details to the ability to generalize, adjust economics on a global scale, and make reliable predictions for how economic conditions would unfold. It happened because he was willing to engage and have his pre-suppositions challenged by people from other perspectives and persuasions. Not only does his memoir, The Age of Turbulence, package the world since I have been alive, (He started in business in 1948 and I was born fewer than ten years later) it gives the economics' ingenue a way to start thinking and understanding the current news. His keys to economic growth assume a legal system that protects the rights of individuals to own property, a culture of trust where people honor their words and contracts, and a process of on-going "creative destruction". "Creative destruction" presupposes that when products become obsolete, they are replaced by new ones instead of being maintained in perpetuity. I highly recommend reading this book for a picture of the past 50 years of American economics and political decision makers on the world stage.