It’s actually worse than that, this guy served as Treasury Secretary in 1999-2001 under Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under Obama. He is literally the man responsible for the austerity measures imposed on the working class of the US and many other countries, dubbed the Great Recession, in response to the bank collapse. He was also the President of Harvard, in charge of reproducing Bourgeois ideology.
Sometimes I wonder whether economists realize their job is to subjugate workers or if they’re really so deluded that they don’t see the connection between their policies and real-life suffering. Like, surely this guy doesn’t think of unemployment as just some variable on an equation that he needs to optimize, right?
I suspect that they are so deluded. They’re convinced that they’re just ‘balancing the books’ and, the bigger problem, most people accept this framing. It’s how you get union members who go on strike and then accept a shit deal because the employer’s accountant shows the books to the workers and proclaims, ‘look, we’re really sorry, but this company does not make a penny profit but out of the goodness of our hearts we are willing to put the whole business at risk and give you a (smaller) compromise on the pay offer so long as you don’t ask where we found the extra money because it would be really uncomfortable if I had to think about it and you might get even angrier’.
Probably the latter. I doubt most westerners, even high ranking ones, actually know anything about communism beyond red menace rhetoric.