On Fri, 7 Oct 2011 Eric Beck wrote:
> Krugman was pretty explicit about this today: "But we shouldn't make
> too much of the lack of specifics. It's clear what kinds of things the
> Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it's really the job of
> policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details."
FWIW, Krugman says he didn't mean it in a coopting sense:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/elitist-me
Aarrgghh! Yves Smith totally misreads what I was saying in today's
column, which presumably means that I didn't write it very well. When I
said that it was the job of policy intellectuals to fill in the details
for the Occupy Wall Street protestors, I didn't mean "don't worry your
pretty little heads about it, we'll work it out". I meant job literally
as in responsibility: people like Joe Stiglitz and me have an
obligation to work on this, helping to translate what justifiably angry
citizens are saying into more fleshed-out proposals. That doesn't mean
taking the public out of the loop; it means putting whatever expertise
you have to work on the public's behalf.
I mean sure, I'm an elitist in the sense that I believe that economics
is a technical subject that benefits from study and hard thinking. But
that's very different from being anti-democratic.
<end quote>
Michael