COMMENT ON A COMMENT

S. Wallerstein, writing from Chile [!!], has made several interesting comments lately.  Here is part of one just posted:

"I watched some Sanders' videos in YouTube and he talks a lot about fighting back and organizing against the elites, against big money and against a system which screws ordinary people, all of which I agree with. However, that kind of talk must freak Krugman out, since Krugman, although anti-neoliberal, is the kind of intellectual who sees all change as coming from enlightened elites, people with Ph.D.'s from top universities and for Krugman, the masses organizing and fighting back must seem uncouth."

I think that is spot-on [as we used to say] about Krugman.  One of the things I really like about Piketty is that after bagging the dream job in the MIT Economics Department at a young age, he walked away from it and went back to France.  He did not exactly rusticate, but it took guts to turn his back on the premier department in the world.  Krugman, by contrast, seems to me to be a supremely smart, naturally progressive careerist.  His contempt for Very Important People [until he became one] is quite consistent with that careerism, because the reference group whose good opinion he seeks and cherishes is not public figures or opinion leaders but rather essentially the Mass Avenue bubble with Harvard at one end and MIT at the other.  That is a bubble I know quite well.

I do wonder, as was suggested, whether he secretly hopes for a plum job in a Clinton Administration.  That wouldn't surprise me at all, nor would I be surprised to learn that behind-the-scenes conversations have already been initiated.  Indeed, he may have been wooed by the Clintons, who are way shrewder than Krugman is about these matters, so that he may not even have been aware that he was being seduced.