Alan Greenspan

Watching C-Span the other night when Alan Greenspan was testifying before congress. I don't know why Mr Greenspan was even there. The dems used their time to bash Bush and the repubs used their time to defend Bush. If they are going to call Mr Greenspan to testify they ought to use the time with this brilliant Man to find out what he knows. Some independent guy, can't remember the name, seems like it was Barney or something, anyway he went on a rampage, like a little kid throwing a tantrum. I couldn't believe it. He was denigrating and negative to Mr Greenspan. He ought to be spending more time helping his constituents find jobs then blaming Mr Greenspan for that lack.

I tried to focus on the remarks of Mr Greenspan and ignore the worthless rhetoric coming from both sides of congress and I was impressed with one thing in particular that he said, and had to repeat many times for the sake of the mindless bickersons he was testifying to, was that the jobless rate is being affected by an extroardinarily high productivity rate gain. He is farily confident that we will not be able to maintain the current level of productivity gain. Interesting. This makes sense to me, as someone who works in technology. But I am not so sure it will come to an end. Just thinking in my own business I know there is lots more I can do to increase productivity. In fact, I don't see an end to it anytime soon.

So, the better we do our jobs at increasing productivity, the worse the job market is going to be.

Another point I appreciated from Mr Greenspan is his comments on training the work force. When he says that there has been a fundamental shift from manual labor to more technical oriented jobs he is right on. Many manual jobs are being automated. He also said that if we can train more people for these jobs then there will not be so many people in the market for "manual" types of jobs, which will in return raise wages as the supply of workers for those jobs decreases. He, of course makes this point brilliantly