Paul Krugman set loose from the NYT onto Substack is a delight. He's got our oligarchs' numbers.
... ask yourself: What’s the point of being rich?
Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires. ...
... many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”
... So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration.... What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.
Of course, Trump’s victory won’t do anything to restore the adulation [the tech bros] miss..., so I can confidently predict that Andreesen and others in his set will keep on whining — that there will be so much whining that we’ll get sick of whining. Actually I already am.
... for sheer cringe value nothing matches Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about “masculine energy.”
Here I must insert an aside (gift) from NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie.
We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys.
Krugman goes on:
... they are defined by their wealth and nothing more, which I believe explains their submission to Trump. Trump would probably be able to damage their businesses if they didn’t bend the knee, but that would still leave them immensely wealthy, just possibly no longer among the wealthiest men on the planet.
The problem for them is that their status as the richest of the rich is, in ego terms, all they have left, which leaves them far more vulnerable than they would be if they were just run-of-the-mill billionaires.
Empty, ignorant men doing ignorant things. What a time!
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