My friend Bill Greider died on Christmas day. Greider, who was eighty-three, was an old-time journalist who believed that the job meant exposing the corruption of the rich and powerful, rather than becoming their friends in order to get inside stories. This meant that he was never very popular with elite types, as perhaps best evidenced by his minimal obituary at the Washington Post, where he had worked for a decade as a reporter and an editor.

Greider’s writing had a large impact on my thinking about the economy and the world. When I was still in graduate school, I read his great study of the Federal Reserve Board, Secrets of the Temple. While there were many things in that book that were not exactly right, it did much to highlight the power of this fundamentally undemocratic institution. I, and many others, have worked with considerable success in recent years to make the Fed more open to public input, and for it to take its legal mandate for maintaining full employment more seriously.

Greider also wrote the book Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy, about the corruption of politics in Washington. The book became the basis for a PBS documentary with the same name. I remember well a segment from this documentary.