Column from Paul Krugman that begins asking why some rich Silicon Valley elites are supporting the kooky Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ends in a different place. Are they just cynically using him to undermine the Democratic Party, or do they sincerely believe the crazy things they're saying?

Krugman argues that it's at least partly the latter, that rich elites are disproportionately likely to be crazy, and for an interesting reason: they're unusually likely to fall victim to reflexive contrarianism, because it was part of their success.

“One sad but true fact of life is that most of the time conventional wisdom and expert opinion are right; yet there can be big personal and social payoffs to finding the places where they’re wrong. The trick to achieving these payoffs is to balance on the knife edge between excessive skepticism of unorthodoxy and excessive credulity.

It’s all too easy to fall off that knife’s edge in either direction.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/opinion/robert-kennedy-jr-silicon-valley.html

#krugman #politics #SiliconValley #contrarianism