Let us entertain, then, the possibility you are a successful man when it comes to understanding finance and that you have a knack for making money multiply but that you are a stupid man when it comes to understanding politics, history, and ideas. Why pretend otherwise? Like most people devoted to accumulation, you are a man of reaction, not reflection. There is a variety of boobus Americanus produced by the nation’s best business schools. They look a lot like you—spending most hours of the day playing the markets. They have no time in their life for literature, or for books that take ideas seriously. They have been trained to discard “normative reasoning” in business decisions as a potential violation of the shareholder’s right to a maximized bottom line. In other words, they have no capacity to incorporate questions of morality or justice into discussions of the economic system.

I saw a glimpse of that when you were grousing on CNBC in November. When Scott Wapner noted that people at the top are seeing “exponential” growth in income while people at the bottom see wage stagnation, your response was the equivalent of a shrug: “What are the causes? I don’t know. You’re raising issues that are beyond my scope.” If the problem of increasing inequality is beyond your scope, Cooperman, you are going to have a hard time understanding what makes people angry in American politics.