ALAN Greenspan can remain secure in his job as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. There's no need for even Warren K. Luke, president of Hawaii National Bank, to fear for his job as one of the nine directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Short course in
controlling money supplyBut thanks to a rainy afternoon in San Francisco recently, I'm a little savvier about what they do.
At 101 Market St., down near the Ferry Building, the lobby of the San Francisco Federal Reserve building fills the public in on some of the secrets of controlling America's monetary system.
How too much money in circulation may cause inflation.
I even played an interactive game in which I was a muffin maker trying to maximize my profit by finding just the right price, not too high and not too low. Trouble was, the weather interfered. Bad weather reduced sales. Good weather boosted them. But sometimes I over-produced or under-produced because the weather forecast was wrong.
Oh, the vagaries of being a profit-seeking business person!
Such are the insights from the "World of Economics" permanent exhibit in the federal bank's lobby. Most kids will find more excitement at Underwater World, not too far away, near Pier 39.
But school teachers do bring their classes here and are offered teaching guides to use when they get back to their classrooms.
The idea for the exhibit grew out of a request by the City of San Francisco, which has one of the best planning departments in the U.S., that the new building provide street-level public space oriented to pedestrians.
A conceptual proposal for the key display, "The World of Economics," was offered by the office of Charles and Ray Eames, a design and communications studio noted for exhibitions on mathematics and "The World of Franklin and Jefferson."
To ensure that the exhibition's content was comprehensive, accurate and balanced, the Federal Reserve Bank, a brochure says, "was fortunate in securing the services of a distinguished group of academic consultants who gave generously of their time and expertise."
The exhibit occupies 8,000 square feet, a substantial area, has 20 separate displays, 12 of them interactive (the muffin maker being my favorite), some delightful sketches, cartoons and photographs and a time line on economic thinking over more than 200 years.
Scot Adam Smith's 1776 "Inquiry Into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations" still stands as a basic foundation for much modern thought. The mid-19th century challenge to this thinking by Karl Marx in his "Communist Manifesto" has been pretty well overtaken by events.
AMERICAN realization of a national interest in a more controlled economy resulted in the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1910. It endeavors to influence the money supply to achieve a non-inflationary growing economy.
One of the interactive exhibits allows the player to be Alan Greenspan and face the difficulty that there is a long lag time after decision-making to see whether the results are as planned. I thank Greenspan and Hawaii's Warren Luke for sharing some of their concepts and headaches with all who visit the lobby at 101 Market St.