Many, many years ago when I was in graduate school and the Berlin Wall was still a matter of global concern, I had classmates who aspired to be professional Soviet watchers.

They studied obscure journals, eagerly followed every official statement from the Politburo and pored over photos of Moscow’s May Day Parade observation stand, searching for clues about the relative standing of the leaders of the Communist Party.

I am reminded of those industrious detective-scholars by the recent burst of news about release of the minutes of meetings of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2006.

The official language of the Fed is reminiscent of those Cold War days. Consider the Federal Open Market Committee, the FOMC Secretariat, Federal Reserve Districts and the Beige Book — collections of “anecdotal information on current economic conditions” in each district. Take away the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole and the eagle from high above the imposing colonnaded entrance, and even the appearance of the Fed headquarters in Washington has the feel of flat, Soviet-era grandiosity.

I say this not in sympathy for some sort of Ron Paulish urge to abolish our nation’s central bank, but simply to underscore the vast difference between the pomp and the circumstance.

The urge to know the thinking of insiders presumes that the insiders know far more than us outsiders. In fact, as we learned about Soviet insiders 25 years ago and are coming to learn about Fed insiders now, they knew far less than we gave them credit for. In both cases, the wizards behind the curtains of Oz were just little old men and wormen like us, struggling to understand social realities far more complex than their theories — of history and of economics — could explain.

“We think the fundamentals of the expansion going forward still look good,” said Timothy Geithner, then president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, in December 2006. “I think we are unlikely to see growth being derailed by the housing market,” said Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed.

The list of embarrassing quotes goes on. And I am the last one to throw stones gratuitously in this regard. As a member of Maine’s Consensus Economic Forecasting Committee at that time, I was equally clueless about the extent of the housing bubble and the severity of the subsequent collapse.

Thus, the reason for this little rant about Politburos, secretariats and inner sanctum wizards is not to criticize anyone, but to remind myself, economists in general and especially the general public to be wary of grand theories, both intellectual and conspiratorial.

We need to worship not theories but facts; we need to think less about models to predict the future and more about facts to understand the present, less about inside-job conspiracies and more about out-in-the-open stupid policies.

Like most economists, I am beguiled by the idea of representing reality with mathematical equations, but my ultimate hero as an economist is not some theoretician or a Nobel prize winner with a school of thought named after him/her.

It is, rather, George Smiley, John LeCarre’s owl-eyed mole hunter from the “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” books and movies. Weighted with deep feelings of culture and patriotism, plagued with doubts about wife, colleagues and country, Smiley doggedly puts aside all the drama, confusion and violence, wipes his glasses with his tie and returns to his clear-headed search for the meaning he is forever convinced lies hidden in a baffling array of stubborn facts. This, rather than parsing the pronouncements of so-called insiders, is, in my mind, the real task for those seriously interested in understanding and shaping public policy in a democratic country. To find the way to prosperity, we must enter the shadow.

Charles Lawton is senior economist for Planning Decisions, a public policy research firm. He can be reached at:

clawton@maine.rr.com