On the way to working the NYT Kenken today, saw Krugman's column and an article on Steve Jobs.
Tweaking what the mandarins would say when a dynasty was on its last legs, these are signs that the 1% is losing the Mandate of Hell.
Jump with me....
For Krugman, "economics failed" in dealing with the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, powerful political factions find that bad economic analysis serves their objectives. Most obviously, people whose real goal is dismantling the social safety net have found promoting deficit panic an effective way to push their agenda. And such people have been aided and abetted by what I’ve come to think of as the trahison des nerds — the willingness of some economists to come up with analyses that tell powerful people what they want to hear....
Because mainstream economics doesn't bite the hand that feeds it, of course it ignores Marx - as well as Darwin (appropriation of the energy budgets of others having established itself as a successful strategy for reproductive fitness long before humans came on the scene).
But now that Piketty is rubbing their noses in the recent history of exploitation, and the Tea Party, high on the same opiates that drove poor whites to give their lives for a slave-based political economy in the Civil War, is threatening the compromise that allowed an imaginary "middle class" to believe they were outside the conflict of the powerful and those they exploit (the concept of the middle class being a diluted form of the same opiate), maybe there's hope for Krugman to overcome his allergy.
Read the Jobs story. This hits me personally for a couple of reasons. Jobs dropped out of the college I went to, as did some of the Mississippi Freedom Riders. I was a stick in the mud (although at least I joined the boycott against our graduation ceremony when the administration invited Herman Kahn as commencement speaker).
Also, when the first Mac appeared in all its unprecedented estheticism, I was a fanboy - and that lasted for years, until I could no longer afford Macs.
Power distorts your personality reality. Maybe Jobs belief that he could deal with his cancer without the help of "Western medicine" was related to that surge of power.
Increasingly asymmetrical power is inevitable in unregulated markets: Darwin+Marx. Jobs' growing power had plenty of victims (conflict minerals, anyone? - more drastic than the wage suppression) - including himself.