On Monday night, Alan Greenspan was on Charlie Rose discussing his new book, “The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting.” At that point, I hadn’t yet read it, and not just because the title makes it sound like something a dentist might give you as a substitute for novocaine. Having written extensively and critically about Greenspan over the years, in the magazine and in two books, I had a jaundiced feeling that I’d already heard what he had to say. But when I switched over to PBS after the Cardinals-Red Sox game, and the former Fed chairman’s unmistakable mug appeared on the screen, I decided to give him another listen.

Rose began by asking why Greenspan and other economists didn’t recognize the housing and credit bubbles. To which Greenspan replied, “It’s not that leading forecasters didn’t know we were in a bubble … That’s very easy to tell.” These statements perked me up. I distinctly remember Greenspan saying on numerous occasions that speculative bubbles were impossible to identify except in retrospect. Indeed, that was one of the justifications he used for failing to raise interest rates, or tighten margin requirements, to prick the dot-com bubble. And he wasn’t alone in his skepticism. In my 2002 book, “Dot.Con,” which was partly based on interviews with the Fed chairman, I recalled how, in 1997, he asked some staff economists at the central bank to review past speculative episodes, and they, too, concluded that there was no reliable method to say when a legitimate bull market had crossed over into a bubble.

How far, then, has Greenspan changed his views on this and other matters? Since admitting at a congressional hearing in October, 2008, that he had “found a flaw” in his free-market ideology, he has apparently been engaged in an intellectual expedition to chart the outlines and extent of this fault. Quite where this pursuit had taken him he didn’t say to Rose. (An obvious first stop would have been to consult some of the vast library devoted to market failures that economists less beholden to laissez-faire have constructed over the past two centuries.) But, sounding rather like an anthropologist just back from Patagonia, he offered that he had found some “extraordinary results.”

What are these earth-shattering findings? Hitherto, Greenspan explained, he had been thinking and acting on the premise that people (and financial institutions) act in their own long-run self-interest, and that the rest of their behavior is random. But actually people’s actions are often driven by “so-called animal spirits … they are deep-seated aspects of human behavior. People act in predictable ways.” Rather than behaving like omnipotent calculating machines, they respond to things like fear, greed, euphoria, and impatience, Greenspan said. Really? Yes, really.

Greenspan explained that in his book he discusses ten of the traits he has identified (“inbred propensities” is the phrase he uses for them), addresses various attempts to measure them, and then brings them all together. “I think I’ve made significant progress,” he added immodestly, and, to illustrate what he meant, he brought up Jane Austen—yes, that Jane Austen. Although her novels were set in early-nineteenth-century England, teen-age girls are still doing exactly the same things now as they did in her writings, he said, adding, “We are a homogenous species.”

Not for the first time, I was given to observe how Greenspan’s low, nasal New York drawl, redolent of unobserved profundities, has served him so well over the decades. As every economist knows, or should know, it was John Maynard Keynes who originated the term “animal spirits,” almost eighty years ago. He used it in reference to businessmen’s periodic urges to invest in capital assets—a phenomenon that Keynes regarded as a key driver of the business cycle. During Greenspan’s eighteen and a half years at the Fed, I don’t think I heard him utter any positive comments about Keynes, but perhaps I missed one or two. During his time at N.Y.U. and Columbia in the late forties and early fifties, he studied Keynesian economics, which was then relatively new. Pretty quickly, he rejected much of it. By the time he met Ayn Rand, with whom he became close, he was already a devotee of free-market economics (also known as neoclassical economics), he reminded Rose.

In “The Map and the Territory,” which I picked up today, Greenspan starts off with Keynes, noting, “I have come around to the view that there is something more systematic about the way people behave irrationally, especially during periods of economic stress, than I had previously contemplated.” He also tips his hat to behavioral economics, which is of more recent vintage, and which has sought to build upon and expand some of Keynes’s insights. (In 2009, the Nobel-winning behavioral economists George Akerlof and Bob Shiller published a book entitled “Animal Spirits.”) Greenspan correctly notes that the behavioral approach doesn’t wholly invalidate the neoclassical approach, but he also acknowledges the obvious: “September 2008 was a watershed moment for forecasters, myself included. It has forced us to incorporate into our macro models those animal spirits that dominate finance.”

This all sounds promising, and admirable, but, in terms of practical policy recommendations, where did it lead the man formerly known as the Maestro? Not very far, it seems.

As his chapters unfold, Greenspan retells the story of how the big banks engorged themselves with dodgy mortgage securities and almost blew themselves up, but he also bemoans “the massive burden of massive new financial regulation that is becoming increasingly counterproductive.” He dwells at length on the rise of spending on entitlements, citing some not very persuasive evidence to suggest that it was responsible for the slowdown in G.D.P. growth in the period from 1965 to 2011 compared to the period from 1870 to 1970. But it isn’t just entitlement spending that he has in his sights—it’s government in general. “The rise of the role of the government has coincided with, and is doubtless a cause of, increasing market rigidity,” he writes. “Competitive flexibility is a necessary characteristic of an innovative growing economy, and we are at the edge of losing it.”

This sounds suspiciously like the Greenspan we have been hearing from forever—the man who championed the repealing of Glass-Steagall, who endorsed the Bush tax cuts (this after endlessly lecturing us about the need for deficit reduction), and who ignored the warnings of his colleagues about the deterioration of credit quality in the housing market. I could go on, but, in a stinging review of “The Map and the Territory,” parts of which Rose read out to him, the Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein has already pressed home the point: “Greenspan’s journey of discovery brings him right back to where he began—to an unshakable faith in free markets, an antipathy toward market regulation, and a conviction that progressive taxes and social spending are to blame for slow growth, stagnant wages and exploding deficits.”

After listening to Greenspan rattle on about his intellectual evolution, Rose asked him some questions about various issues of the moment: the Dodd-Frank legislation, the debt ceiling, Janet Yellen, and the like. Most of his replies were predictable. He suggested that the financial-regulation bill, in its current form, was unlikely to work. He bemoaned the death of bipartisanship, recalling the days when House Speaker Tip O’Neill would visit the White House for an evening of whiskey with President Gerald Ford. (Greenspan was Ford’s top economic adviser.) He said that the growth of entitlements was a big threat to the economy. And he described Yellen, who is married to Akerlof, as “a highly skilled economist,” adding that he had learned a lot from her when she worked with him at the Fed.