Michael Kinsley applies Greenspan's Aristotelianism on Greenspan

and gets interesting results:

You could describe what Volcker did as officially accepting the theory of monetarism, or as contracting the supply of M1. Whatever. But put bluntly, what he did was to purposely engineer the deepest decline since the Great Depression in order to wring inflation — and the expectation of future inflation — out of the economy. This set the stage for the generation of prosperity that Greenspan presided over.

Greenspan deserves enormous credit for staying the course. And yet — as he himself tells it in this book — he also helped Ronald Reagan in 1980 to demagogue economic policy as a way of attacking Jimmy Carter. He wrote a speech for Reagan blaming Carter for “one of the major economic contractions in the last 50 years.” Reagan changed that to “a new depression — the Carter depression.” Within a week, this had turned into: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his!” Greenspan says, “What attracted me to Reagan was the clarity of his conservatism.”

As Greenspan surely knows but doesn’t admit, Reagan achieved this appealing clarity by ignoring the “objective reality separate from consciousness” that Greenspan used to treasure. And Greenspan does the same. Early in Reagan’s administration, as a member of the president’s economic advisory board, he supported Reagan’s tax cuts “if spending was restrained” and if the Fed kept money tight. Volcker’s Fed continued to do its bit but Reagan, famously, did not, leading to enormous deficits. Greenspan says, “Congress shied away from the necessary restraints on spending.” But the data — those good old data — show that the budgets Reagan proposed were only slightly smaller than the budgets Congress eventually passed.

The data also show that George W. Bush has done a better job than Reagan did at controlling government spending. Spending has averaged 19.7 percent of G.D.P. during Bush’s first six years — Iraq war and all — while it was 22.4 percent during Reagan’s eight years. (If you assume a year’s lag between policy and result, it’s 22.3 percent.)

Half this book — the half that is getting no attention — isn’t memoir: it’s what Greenspan calls “detective stories”: just Alan riding the data wherever it takes him, having the time of his life, trying to solve all the world’s economic puzzles, like why it took so long for computers to affect productivity, why incomes are becoming more unequal and what to do about it, the energy crisis, immigration, entitlements and so on. Not all of this is wildly original, but there are great nuggets and aperçus. And it is all written in English and fully comprehensible.