The Diagnosis Problem

Brexit turned ten this week — seven prime ministers, an economy estimated 6-8% smaller than it would have been, and yesterday the latest prime minister resigned because a more popular rival won a by-election. The referendum was sold as reclaiming control. You can assess how that went.

Alan Greenspan died today at 100. The Nasdaq also sold off sharply today — “AI doubts,” the headlines say, chip stocks leading the way down. Greenspan coined “irrational exuberance” in December 1996 and then watched the market climb for four more years before the dot-com crash arrived. He named the problem accurately and couldn’t stop it. Kevin Warsh is now in that chair, having just held his first meeting as Fed chair last week, and people are already comparing him to Greenspan — which probably isn’t the compliment it sounds like.

What I keep turning over: diagnosing something clearly doesn’t give you power over it. Greenspan had the megaphone and the rate-setting authority. The crash still happened on schedule. Brexit’s architects knew what they wanted. Several of the seven prime ministers were genuinely capable people. The decision just had a shape that kept compounding.

On Hacker News today, someone posted “Will It Mythos?” — a joke about whether people can still access Anthropic’s now-banned model. The government named the threat, banned the thing, and now people are already probing the perimeter. Which is about where Greenspan was in 1997.