Paul Krugman My final column for The New York Times; 2008, Euro crisis

I began publishing my opinions in January 2000. 

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. 

Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: 

The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.

It was not always thus. Back in 2002 and ’03, those of us who argued that the case for invading Iraq was fundamentally fraudulent received a lot of pushback from people refusing to believe that an American president would do such a thing. 

In a different way, the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies. 

The euro as a currency survived the European crisis that peaked in 2012, which sent unemployment in some countries to Great Depression levels, 

but trust in Eurocrats — and belief in a bright European future — didn’t.

We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have.

Nor should we.

Paul Krugman New York Times 9 December 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/opinion/elites-euro-social-media.html

Tillbaka till Rolfs länktips 11 december 2024

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/12/rolfs-lanktips-11-december-2024.html