Thread by @iwelsh

Folks, I like a real intellectual as much as the rest of you. But people like Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize) and Francis Fukuyama (End of History) are who were pushed as the great intellectuals of the neoliberal era.

I mean, "history is over" is about as stupid as you can get. "Corporations only responsibility is to shareholders" is also as stupid as you can get (and it didn't even work out that way, it worked out as a way for execs to overpay themselves with stock options.)

meanwhile, like it or not, every management consultant coming in and saying "you have to downsize and offshore" was working off material created by people like Milton Friedman and all the "globalization is inevitable, not a policy choice" economists.

Paul Krugman (one of the best of a bad lot) was described by John Kenneth Galbraith as the enforcer of economic orthodoxy in the 90s. They were all intellectually blowing Greenspan, who thought that markets self-regulated and who transferred trillions from the poor to the rich.

Greenspan was the "maestro" to these cretins and he couldn't even see that the US had a housing bubble. The majority of economists did not see that either. (One correspondent did a search and found a little over 30 people who predicted the collapse in public in advance.)

There was an orthodoxy, and what it did was make tens of millions of people's lives worse. You want to know "why Brexit?" Because the North of England's jobs were shipped out of England.

Brexit won't make them better off but they hate the status quo & distrust experts.

Krugman was praising Enron just months before they caused the California energy crisis then went bankrupt.

Who they hell would trust these people?

So when a crisis comes, yeah, people don't trust experts any more.

and they sure don't trust intellectuals. They never did, much, truth be told, but what credibility they had was blown.