Unbearable Lightness of Apolitical Technocratism

Over to the Crooked Timber, there was a flurry of posts on left neoliberalism. One of the key points raised was its cluelessness when it comes to politics because of its technocraticism, should that be a word. Today, it seems to me, Krugman shows that this kind of cluelessness is more widespread than you might think.

He writes of the Fed's announcements on rate hikes, i.e., there won't be any with these, I won't say snotty or sophmoric but I will think them, remarks:

The Fed didn’t announce a new policy. And despite what some press reports said, it didn’t even commit to keeping rates low; all it did was say that if the economy stays weak, rates will stay low — well, duh — and that it might think about doing other stuff one of these days [.]

He then notes that " three members of the FOMC dissented even from that" silly, obvious and totally  duh worthy utterance. Get that? Something that was so obviously obvious roughly 1/3 of the board voted no. I bet the the 2/3s who voted yes are thrilled to find out that Krugman thinks that they are dolts and dullards.

Then he writes that

if you really thought that the Plosser-Kocherlakota view that rates need to rise even in the face of low inflation and high unemployment because, well, they just should was going to prevail, this might have given you some comfort.

What he means here is something like "just because the people who have been wrong about everything  didn't get their way this time there's no reason to be happy and praise those who did the right thing. The important point is to belittle people with whom you hope to craft a policy alliance."

Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that. Except to the extent that alienating potential allies in a desperate moment is bad idea.