When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions.A different analysis -- one that better understood that the quantitative risk of an event is the probability of occurrence times the cost, and one one which still remembered the previous unthinkable-ness of the "bond vigilante" attack on Wall Street -- might view Krugman as providing a self-referential representation of a Serious Person whose beliefs rest on prejudices (or [in this case] material interests), not analysis.
Of deeper interest is the consequence of the -- agreed upon -- insight. Krugman advises his readers to be on guard for the "foundation of fantasy" in-, and therefore not be fooled by-, opposing arguments. This is likely be a rhetorical ploy: Krugman surely recognizes that if Princeton professors can rise above the natural prejudice that otherwise ensnares Serious People, his readership largely cannot. He is, then, intentionally strengthening their own prejudices by discouraging them from taking seriously -- analyzing -- opposing political arguments.
Properly analyzed, Krugman's column provides illustration that the true distinction is not between people/arguments guided by rational analysis vs those grounded in prejudice, rather between those which recognize the intrinsic limit/locality of rationality vs those which do-, or can-, not: There is, in the end, always a "foundation of fantasy" to be found beneath most any rational analysis; the question is what one does with it.
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