[OPE] The ultimate Greenspan speech

In the past, I have defended Dr Geenspan's empirical knowledge of the US economy against the dreary, unresearched prejudices of the Left, and I have also criticized Dr Greenspan's illiteracy about the socialist tradition. His most recent testimony to the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is extremely revealing, and very important if you want to understand how you can go wrong. Here's a link to the short video excerpt:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/23/greenspan-bush-mortgage-crisis/ It is worth watching if you have a moment. The bourgeois press naturally omitted the most important thing in its news reports, and the full transcript of Dr Greenspan's statements is not available.

Greenspan says literally he had an ideology, a "conceptual framework", and it was wrong (notwithstanding his very comprehensive empirical knowledge). Well I do admire him for his honesty here, at least he can say he was wrong, and why he thinks that is. Leftists may snigger and jeer, but serious, scientific people try to learn.

Your theory may be correct, but the experiential evidence is lacking, or vice versa, your theory may be incorrect, despite tremendous experience. Question then is, what steps we can take to minimise this problem?

>From our point of view, I think, one factor of prime importance is how the theory itself is formed.

Jurriaan

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Received on Thu Oct 23 17:26:35 2008