Alan Greenspan died this week at age 100. He was the Federal Reserve chair during my entire childhood.

But since I wasn’t really following markets and macro at the time, I don’t think of him in terms of monthly announcements about interest rates. What I find most interesting now is the winding personal and intellectual path he took to become a long-serving Fed chair.

He studied clarinet at Julliard before later getting economics degrees at NYU. He supposedly attended the famous 1944 Bretton Woods conference that organized the post-war international monetary system- but as part of an orchestra, not as a monetary economist. In 1966 he coauthored “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” with Ayn Rand, where he argued against antitrust and consumer protection laws and for the gold standard. This may be why my intro macro professor Bobbie Horn always referred to Greenspan as “Ayn Rand’s boy toy”.

His advocacy for the gold standard is striking given that just two years later he would join the campaign of Richard Nixon, who took the US off the gold standard in 1971. Then Greenspan would go on to chair the Fed in the now-standard discretionary manner while making, as far as I can tell, no attempts to move it back in the direction of a gold standard.

While it’s unclear whether Greenspan’s unusual path improved his ability as a Chair, it was at least possible then to reach the office by his somewhat unusual path. Since his 1987 appointment the path to the highest appointed offices narrowed to include only more conventional candidates. Randy Barnett and Josh Blackman noted this in a 2015 article on the Supreme Court:

earnest, platinum-résumé’d law geeks have their eyes set on “the Big Bench,” so they keep tidy lives because they think they might someday face a confirmation hearing. It is an unfortunate reality today that to be a judge, you cannot hold vehement opinions prior to the nomination and confirmation process.

I see similar forces at work in economics, where the 50 economists who have a shot at being Fed Chair and the 500 who think they do all hold their tongues. But what does that mean for the kind of Fed Chairs we get?

the truth about SCOTUS-wannabes who “trim their sails” and limit their potential based on a fear of a future confirmation hearing: Such persons lack the character a justice needs…. “Courage is a muscle. You develop courage by exercising it. Sitting on the fence is not practice for standing up.” Imagine what it takes to live your whole professional and personal life as a “justice-in waiting.” These SCOTUS-wannabes spend their careers seeking the approval of others, in the hopes that one day they will be nominated because of their friendships across the political spectrum. 

Barnett and Blackman argued that this should change, and I think this is now in the process of changing again:

Such willfully “stealth candidates” should be disqualified from consideration for the Supreme Court…. We need jurists who are fearlessly committed to the rule of law, reputation be damned…. Paper trails are an asset, not a disqualification.