The Age of Turbulence

I name this post after the book I’m currently reading, The Age of Turbulence, by Alan Greenspan. I honestly didn’t quite know who Greenspan was before reading this book. I knew he had something to do with the American economy, and was the chairman or head of some government agency or something. But I wasn’t clear on the details, and didn’t know at all what sort of a person he was.

I now know that he was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in America, and that he was of a rather reserved character. He wasn’t outspoken like what you’d expect typical “leaders” to be, and he shied away from politics. His real interest was in knowledge, in analysis of numbers.

I found that fascinating. I never really looked at the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, rather, I always thought one sought knowledge for “greater” ends, like political power or, say, money. It definitely gave me a new perspective on things, and now I find myself asking questions for curiosity’s sake, as opposed to having any real reason to.

It was also through this book that I realised how interconnected everything was. Besides elaborating a little on the more obvious interconnectedness between countries due to globalisation and the like, the book also opened my eyes to the interconnectedness between various disciplines.

The relationship between business and information technology is obvious for me, but between disciplines as diverse as information technology, business, political, and economics, it does tend to make me think a little more at how every discipline just leads to one thing: the study of life.

It also brought up for me the idea of systems thinking, where actions created on a more micro scale can, the power of systems, lead to big, macro results.