I don’t watch financial news, but CNBC was on in the gym, so I was treated to a long ad from Ron Paul, who wants you to buy his video explaining the coming crisis brought on by loose money. And I found myself thinking about the remarkable fact that there really are people who will buy that video.

After all, Ron Paul has been making the same prediction year after year — in fact, he’s been making this prediction at least since 1981! — and has been wrong year after year. It’s hard to think of a doctrine that has been as thoroughly refuted by events as goldbug economics. For a while gold prices did go up, although not for the reasons the goldbugs thought, but now even that has gone into reverse. So why would anyone pay money for this guy’s analysis?

Of course, we know why: it’s the Bernie Madoff effect, a.k.a. affinity fraud. People believed Madoff because he was their kind of guy, never mind the implausibility of his claims; they believe Ron Paul for the same reason. True, there’s no reason to suppose that Paul is deliberately misleading his market – he probably believes his own nonsense. But in terms of the underlying dynamics that makes no difference.

So who are the people who feel a deep affinity with a crotchety crank? Um, crotchety white guys feeling cranky. The whiteness is, I believe, an important part of the story, as I’ll explain in a minute.

The basic mindset of the kind of people who pay Ron Paul for his economic advice is pretty clear: they’ve made some money over the course of their lives, they believe that all of it reflects their own virtue, and they think they know from that experience what it takes to create wealth. They hear that the Fed is printing money, and it sounds to them like a violation of both the laws of economics and morality — and they surely think of it as a plot to take away their completely earned gains and give them to Those People (hence the whiteness issue).

You can try as hard as you like to tell such people that monetary policy is mainly a technical problem, that the Fed isn’t giving money away, and that predictions of runaway inflation have been utterly wrong; it will make no difference. You can point out that they would have done a much better job of investing if they had listened to the MIT gang; sorry, we’re just not their kind of people.

I’d say it’s sad, but I find it hard to feel much sympathy for the marks of this particular scam. Then again, that’s probably why they will never, ever listen to what I have to say.