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Title: The Map and the Territory

Subtitle: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting

Author: Alan Greenspan

Narrator: Malcolm Hillgartner

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-22-13

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 33 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Technology

Publisher's Summary:

Like all of us, though few so visibly, Alan Greenspan was forced by the financial crisis of 2008 to question some fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. No one with any meaningful role in economic decision making in the world saw beforehand the storm for what it was. How had our models so utterly failed us?

To answer this question, Alan Greenspan embarked on a rigorous and far-reaching multiyear examination of how Homo economicus predicts the economic future, and how it can predict it better. Economic risk is a fact of life in every realm, from home to business to government at all levels. Whether we're conscious of it or not, we make wagers on the future virtually every day, one way or another. Very often, however, we're steering by out-of-date maps, when we're not driven by factors entirely beyond our conscious control.

The Map and the Territory is nothing less than an effort to update our forecasting conceptual grid using twenty-first-century technologies. It integrates the history of economic prediction, the new work of behavioral economists, and the fruits of the author's own remarkable career to offer a thrillingly lucid and empirically based grounding in what we can know about economic forecasting and what we can't. The audiobook explores how culture is and isn't destiny and probes what we can predict about the world's biggest looming challenges, from debt and the reform of the welfare state to our competition with China to natural disasters in an age of global warming.

No map is the territory, but Greenspan's approach, grounded in his trademark rigor, wisdom, and unprecedented context, ensures that this particular map will assist in safe journeys down many different roads, traveled by individuals, businesses, and the state.

Members Reviews:

I profit from listening, and sometimes disagree

This is a wide-ranging tour of ideas and history that have been capturing Mr Greenspan's attention since he left the Fed, and he thereafter admitted before Congress as the Great Recession unfolded, that some big assumptions and models he was using hadn't worked. I like to listen to his mind working, as, for example, he loosely cobbles together an economic model in front of the reader, or walks through a stretch of history, lucidly pointing out big salient features of how we got here. Like many very smart people I know, he shows a gift sometimes for displaying (what seem to me glaring) gaps in his reasoning, or for ignoring a 900-pound factual gorilla looming in the situation. (This is the reputed libertarian Ayn Rand disciple who yet worked in and around government much of his adult life, openly disliked government's solutions, yet became arguably the most powerful individual inside government, whereupon he showered cheap credit into the banking system for a very extended period (meanwhile refusing to exercise his statutory powers to regulate various mortgage finance practices) as a vast unstable housing bubble heaved up and (soon enough after he left the job) collapsed into the worst mess since the Great Depression.) This wouldn't be the first time models worked well until they didn't. But, aside from some sidestepping perhaps, he intrepidly wrestles with some big questions. For example, he tackles why this recovery was seemingly this tepid and slow.