Greenspan, You're No Bill Gates

Testifying yesterday before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan defended his 21-year tenure at the Central Bank, saying it wasn't he who inflated the housing bubble that caused the Great Recession.

While mistakes were made, Greenspan admitted, he claimed to have been correct 70 percent of his time at the Fed, which sounds pretty good. The unanswered question in all this finger-pointing and next-day quarterbacking, though, is whether being right 70 percent of the time is good enough.

It isn't.

That's not just my opinion. It's a central conclusion of the 1977 Stanford University computer science dissertation of Charles Simonyi, longtime head of Microsoft's application group, the father of Microsoft Office, and now a celebrated space tourist.