Today in the American Meritocracy

Needless to say, being disastrously wrong about pretty much everything hasn’t resulted in him being discredited — he’ll still be widely treated as a great sage while the human toll from his errors continues to accumulate.

One thing that sticks out from this review of Greenspan’s new book in the Times is how even the most banal observation can be treated as a remarkable insight as long as someone has the unearned reputation as a great intellectual:

This tour has its attractions. Mr. Greenspan, one of the nation’s most astute economic observers, has a rare talent for framing economic trends. He writes, for example, that as the value of the nation’s economic output has increased since the 1970s, the weight has not. He means this literally: If everything “Made in the U.S.A.” in 2013 was placed on a giant scale, it would weigh about as much as everything “Made in the U.S.A.” in 1977. It’s hard to imagine a more vivid illustration of what it means to say that the United States has shifted toward a “knowledge economy.”

So a highlight of the book is Greenspan informing us that the American economy relies less on manufacturing in 2013 than it does in 1977? What’s the second most interesting point in the book, an observation that water is wet? I guess one advantage of generally being horribly wrong is that when you’re merely trite it seems like genius by comparison.

UPDATE: “This seems to me to be not the thinking of the Gnomes of Zurich, but rather the Gnomes of South Park.”