"The wrongheadedness of the gravitas crowd, like its sexism, is subtler. But to the extent that having gravitas means something other than being male, it means being what I like to call a Very Serious Person — the kind of person who talks a lot about the need to make tough decisions, which somehow always involves demanding sacrifices on the part of ordinary families while treating the wealthy with kid gloves. And here’s the thing: The Very Serious People have been almost as consistently wrong, although not as spectacularly, as the inflation hysterics." -- the New York Times' Nobel Prize winning columnist Paul Krugman, today explaining why Dr. Janet Yellen, current vice chairperson of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, is far and away the best choice to succeed Fed Chair Ben Bernanke.
Krugman observes that there has been a campaign rooted in sexism to deny Dr. Yellen the position by the "Very Serious Persons" that have been wrong on most economic matters for years. Those same "Very Serious Persons" are promoting Larry Summers for the job, despite Summers' record of "failing upward" after the bank deregulation fiasco, collapse of the derivatives market, and his less-than-stellar tenure as the head of Harvard University.
