Mr. Greenspan’s attempts to explain the existence of these sects begins to reveal just how unscientific economists can be. Mr. Greenspan ranks “the United States as the most ‘free’ of the larger economies” and believes, apparently, that therefore, Americans are less risk averse than people elsewhere. It may be, for instance, that Americans support this freer economic system because they are poorly educated and therefore more gullible than people in countries that have better educational systems.

There is no question that the American educational system is inferior to the educational systems in many other countries. The will-publicized country-by-country comparisons that invariably show that American students are less competent in many areas of study need not be repeated. When graduates of some of America’s most prestigious universities, such as the current crop of presidential candidates, can openly reject evolution and when various branches of the national government routinely rewrite scientific studies to make them conform to the administration’s political ideology, the failure of the American educational system becomes evident. In America, ideology trumps truth.

An explanation of the failure of even America’s universities to educate their graduates is not hard to find. That America has had a long-standing anti-intellectual culture has been well documented. See Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, for instance The American educational system is fractured. Local control of primary and secondary schools, often controlled by school-boards made up of poorly educated people who seek to promote personal agendas, is a tradition dating back to the nation’s founding. Then, too, American universities were not generally founded to educate people. They were founded to train people for professions; in effect, they were founded as vocational training rather than educational institutions. After the Civil War, the creation of the land-grant university system was explicitly designed for vocational training. It especially characterizes our graduate departments of economics. In 2003, a protest against a similar course then proposed by professor Marty Feldstein, an ex-adviser to President Reagan, led to the creation of an alternative intro economics course, taught by radical economist Steve Marglin.

Mr. Greenspan ignores completely one salient difference between American and Continental educational systems. In the American educational system, analytical thinking prevails. Economic phenomena are examined as though they had no consequences to society in general. The consequences of changes in one social environment are related to the effects those changes have in other social environments. Whereas American economists think almost exclusively in terms of economic growth, Europeans think in terms of society as a whole. American economists can always find ways of excusing the adverse human consequences of an economic process; the Europeans emphasize the adverse consequences to society as being more important than the economic process. This distinction has been evident in economic circles since the formation of the so-called historical school, and Mr. Greenspan should have recognized it.

But Mr. Greenspan reveals something else about economics that is rarely called attention to—the delusions economists labor under in relation to the real-world economy. When Mr. Greenspan makes risk-taking the characteristic of the American economy, he is delusional. Certainly America has its share of risk-takers. Economic risk-taken may be thought of as a characteristic of entrepreneurs. But entrepreneurs alone cannot make an economy; if everyone was an entrepreneur, no workers would exist to carry out entrepreneurial ventures. When people borrow to buy homes, automobiles, appliances, etc., they do not intend to use their purchases in ways that will create surplus value. Any economist who thinks of the economy in terms of entrepreneurial risk-taking is engaged in self delusion.

Mr. Greenspan is also delusional when he writes about creative destruction. As examples of creative destruction, Mr. Greenspan mentions the telegraph industry’s demise because of the introduction of the telephone, the tin can’s demise when the aluminum can became feasible, which he relates to the demise of the steel industry. Certainly some workers were displaced when the telephone industry replaced the telegraph industry and then the aluminum industry reduced the steel industry. When Fisher-Price offshored the manufacturing of toys to China, it was not because the Chinese had developed new toy-making technology. The technology used in offshore places is exactly the same technology that is being used in America or Europe or anywhere else. So although there is a phenomenon known as creative destruction, what is happening in America today is mere destruction. People don’t trust the businesses they buy from. Trust is something that does not exist in business; that is why contracts exist, and why firms such as Microsoft exempt themselves from all liability for damages within their contracts. If Mr. Greenspan trusts the firms he does business with, he is delusional.

But the unavoidable problem with Classical/Neoclassical economics, which Mr. Greenspan glosses, is its immorality. Mr. Greenspan fails to recognize that this statement is entirely meaningless. It does not say that businessmen are not unscrupulous; it does not say that competition puts unscrupulous businessmen out of business; it does not say just how unscrupulous a businessman must be to be flagrantly unscrupulous.

As a matter of fact, there is absolutely no reason to believe that people in business are any more honest than the population in general, and there is good reason to believe that business in a free-market promotes crime and vice, both of which are epidemic in the United States. Businesses that employ puffery to market products will, without batting an eyelash, discharge an employee who is found to have puffed up his resumé.

Mr. Greenspan claims, that free markets increase material well-being to a greater extent than regulated markets. But tell me, how does the marketing of bottled water, which is never tested and whose source is rarely identified, increase the well-being of the people who are snookered into buying it, especially when ordinary tapwater is regularly tested, comes from a well-known source, and is considerably cheaper? The same questions can be asked about numerous other products—the McDonalds hamburger, Taco Bueno’s tacos, pizza from numerous pizza vendors—the list is endless. The Fox affiliate in Dallas regularly runs a feature called “Deal or Dud.” The channel buys products heavily advertised on television and has them tested by ordinary viewers. If a product works as advertised, it’s called a Deal, if not, it’s called a Dud. As a matter of fact, Mr. Greenspan’s book is itself a dud. Mr. Greenspan’s name on the title page can be likened to other forms of puffery. So how does manufacturing and marketing products that don’t work increase the material well-being of consumers? And consider the snake-oils people are sold that are classified as dietary supplements? Mr. Greenspan and other economists claim that the free market results in the most efficient allocation of capital. Not only is free-market economics immoral, there is some evidence that it could not exist if the immorality were removed. In an impressive new book, The Social Conscience, Michel Glautier asks whether a caring society can exist in a market economy? His analysis suggests that recent and continuing changes to the market economy are putting the achievement of a caring society beyond reach. Child labor, corruption, “excessive” executive pay, corporate earnings manipulation, and commercial activities by universities all promote censured conduct. When unethical behavior cuts costs, competition drives down prices and entrepreneurs’ incomes, and thereby reduces their willingness to pay for ethical conduct. Do we really want an economic system that institutionalizes prevarication and encourages greed, crime, and vice? The world became a better place, I thought, if people focused exclusively on what was knowable. . . .” Unfortunately somewhere alone the way, Mr. Greenspan lost this focus and became an apologist for the free-market system when he “decided to engage in efforts to advance free-market capitalism.”