That so many of the well-off lack economic knowledge has also puzzled me.

This is one of the reasons I don’t understand why the rich have become so focused on the short term. Their obsession with short-term profits is bad for them long-term. I would think that they would be the most vocal supporters of things like welfare (Food stamps!) and unemployment and education and all those things that allow the middle class to thrive. But in general, they aren’t. Maybe it isn’t that surprising, though. In my experience, people in business are often clueless about how the macroeconomy works.

What is odd is this obsession with the next quarter or the very short term even when it doesn’t benefit them (no bonus, etc.) to think and to behave this way.

Then I realized, though, that people get locked in to certain mindsets and cannot easily deviate from them. Take a poor person and give them a lot of money, they still behave like a poor person. It’s why many lottery winners are broke only a few years after winning millions.

But taking a not-very-smart person and giving them money does not — as we Americans tend to believe — make them smart. It just makes them rich.

There is also of course a certain ideology that is inculcated in various classes in the US, and straying from it is only done in rare cases, and by very exceptional people. Studies show this consistently.

The rich in their way are just as captured by the dominant sentiment as any other group — right now, that dominant disposition consists of rapacious neoliberalism sprinkled with disdain for anyone not obsessed with profit. Evidence against the benefit of this even to them does not matter. That’s how ideologies work, really.