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Sure, Philip Rosedale is the founder and CEO of Linden Lab. But he prefers to think of himself as the Federal Reserve chair – of Second Life, the popular online role-playing world Linden Lab operates. It’s a free-market playground where creative minds frolic, and Second Lifers have created a functioning economy based largely on services and real estate. (Sound familiar?) Which got us thinking: How does Rosedale compare to the most famous of all Fed chiefs, the oracular Alan Greenspan? (New Fed chair Ben Bernanke hasn’t been on the job long enough to earn his own adjective.) We combed through their résumés for this macroeconomic face-off.
– Daniel Gross
Rosedale vs Greenspan
Size of economy supervised
Rosedale:
$7.7 million per month
Greenspan:
$1 trillion per month
God-like power
Rosedale:
Controls currency exchange rate by manipulating money supply
Greenspan:
Controlled currency exchange rate by manipulating money supply
Libertarian tell
Rosedale:
Second Life doesn’t really have regulations
Greenspan:
Youthful acolyte of objectivist Ayn Rand
Technique to encourage maximum spending
Rosedale:
Ensures that the Linden Dollar doesn’t appreciate against the US dollar, making it impractical and unattractive to keep Linden Dollars in savings accounts.
Greenspan:
Ensured that interest rates remained low during periods of relatively slow growth, making it impractical and unattractive to keep US dollars in savings accounts.
Powerful backer
Rosedale:
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com
Greenspan:
The last four US presidents
Means of maintaining price stability
Rosedale:
Aggressively adding money to the currency supply as the overall size of the economy increases.
Greenspan:
Reducing the supply of money by aggressively raising interest rates when inflation begins to rise.
Catchphrase
Rosedale:
“I’m not building a game. I’m building a new country.”
Greenspan:
“But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to un-expected and prolonged contractions, as they have in Japan over the past decade?”
credit:Toby Burditt
Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab
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