the sun will come out tomorrow.
Populism makes me nervous. I'm a nervous guy anyway, an ex-risk manager (a psyche one never manages to overcome, at least, not me, not yet), a conservative person with paranoid tendencies. Populism is, on one level, about the masses feeling discord with the system, and with the "elite" that succeed in that system
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There are some pretty legitimate complaints:
1. the greater and greater tournamentization of the economy (nearly all the growth goes to a very small cadre of lucky (mostly also high skill) winners, while 80% of the population is actually losing ground).
2. The complete lack of government response to the economic collapse and the fact that we are still in a hole with huge unnecessary unemployment.
3. That those most responsible for the crisis have been largely bailed out (top execs/traders/marketers at investment banks), while everybody else gets a pile of rhetoric about how we have to tighten our belts, and maybe cut SS benefits, etc.
Of course, most of the people at the protests don't really have a good sense of the esoteric details of which policies have helped to get us here or what could be done about it. OTOH, many are talking about legitimate strategies.
I met somebody at Zuccotti park who was handing out flyers discussing about modern monetary theory, and the benefits of NGDP targeting or "helicopter drops." This might not do much about point 1, but could help immensely on point 2. I've also noticed that monetary strategies mostly limited to blog-discussions over the last couple years suddenly got recommended by some economists at Goldman Sachs and discussed all over the NYT and WP -- a few weeks after the protests started.
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