Once you’ve been in the Agile mindset for a while, you begin seeing the world through a different lens. As I apply the “wisdom of crowds” to the projects my teams undertake, I find their estimates more accurate and approaches to complex issues are indeed more accurate than the smartest guy in the room. I’ve recently been considering the impact of this thinking as it may apply to the economy.
I’m not an economist, but I do enjoy reading the various approaches to the same problem — how to keep the world from going broke. I learned how fragile our understanding economics is from reading Alan Greenspan’s book Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World . Among other insights, he mentions the science of economics is so new no one really has a handle on how to manage it.
In a very basic sense there are two major approaches. On one side there is John Maynard Keynes. He advocated government monetary and fiscal programs intended to stimulate business activity and increase employment. On the other hand you have Classical economics (also known as liberal economics). This asserts that markets function best with minimal government interference. Milton Friedman, was a strong proponent of this “free market” capitalism. In the United States, Republicans are generally supporters of li