I don't really know why hedge fund managers are so unfairly maligned. Very likely, part of it is envy and part of it is incomprehension, but there is probably more to it than that. Blaming rootless cosmopolitans and 'international bankers' for all of society's woes has been a favourite demagogic tactic for so long, and across so many different nominal ideologies, that I think it may well speak to deep primal instincts. But it's not something I claim much insight into.

I very rarely use the word "offensive" to describe something, but I'm going to use it here. You are essentially claiming with your links that people who don't like hedge fund managers are really antisemites. (And please don't pretend that's not what you intended given where your links go.) This is factually inaccurate and attempts to use a heavily emotionally charged historical issues. In the most charitable interpretation, this is due to pattern matching. This is especially irrelevant since no one was asking why you think hedge fund managers are as a group maligned.

If I had to make a guess though I do think you are right that parts are due to envy and to incomprehension. I suspect that part of it is also connected to people conflating all the different "Wall Street" activity and don't for example distinguish the genuinely productive work (which some hedge funds do) and things like micro-trading which really isn't productive.

As for why they are more worthy of praise and emulation than scientists or academics - basically, on the margin, we have too few hedge fund managers (which is why they earn so much)

This is at best confused. You seem to be assuming that the only or primary cause for why something would be payed a lot is high demand and low supply. This does not follow. Regulatory capture is one of many ways that a market can produce a situation where this doesn't occur.

and too many academics.

And this fails for similar reasons. One cannot use how much people are paid as a useful judgment for their worth. The primary problems here are positive externalities and public goods. Scientific research is effectively a public good so making people pay a lot for it is intrinsically difficult. Moreover, the people who go into science are not in general people who are heavily interested in being paid a lot.

We have already discussed at length (see e.g. here and here ) my view of why academics and scientists are overpraised and overemulated, so I don't intend to repeat that discussion.

Oh right! I forgot you were that person. Too bad you don't want to continue that. You left a number of sub-issues there hanging where I would have been interested in your responses.

Hedge fund managers, by contrast, are playing an important role in global resource allocation. We are in the middle of a huge Factor Price Equalization which is slowly making the world a more prosperous place, by increasing the productive capacity and wages of the Third World. We could do with some more of that.

That seems like an iffy argument. Yes FPE is important and is a major aspect of what is currently pushing up the economics of the developing world. But hedge funds aren't by and large specifically involved with that any more than any other aspect of the economic system.