Paul Krugman

Paul Robin Krugman (born February 28, 1953) is an economist at Princeton University who has written several books and since 2000 has written a twice-weekly op-ed column for The New York Times. He is currently a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Krugman is famous in academe for his work on trade theory in providing models where countries could gain from employing barriers to free trade and for his textbook explanations of currency crises. He was also a vocal critic of the new economy view of the late 1990s as well as pegged exchange rate regimes of the island Asia nations and Thailand before the 1997 debacle as well as relying on governments to defend the pegged rates that investors like Long Term Capital Management relied on just before the 1998 Russian debt default. His International Economics: Theory and Policy (currently in its seventh edition) is a standard textbook on international economics without resort to calculus. In 1991 he was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association. Krugman's economic philosophy can best be described as neo-Keynesian, which he has made accessible to the common reader in books such as Peddling Prosperity, which criticize Democratic policies of the late 1980s to mid 1990s.

Krugman is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's foreign and domestic policies. Unlike many economic pundits, Krugman is also regarded as an important scholarly contributor by his peers. Krugman has written over 200 articles and twenty ^* books — some of them academic, and some of them written for the layperson.

Biography

Krugman (pronounced with a long U) was born and grew up on Long Island, and majored in economics (though his initial interest was in history) as an undergraduate at Yale University. He obtained a Ph.D. from MIT in 1977 and taught at Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and Stanford University before joining the faculty of Princeton University, where he has been since 2000. From 1982 to 1983, he spent a year working at the Reagan White House as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is also a member of the international economic body, the Group of Thirty.

When Bill Clinton came into office in 1992, it was expected that Krugman would be given a leading post, but he was passed over in favor of Laura Tyson primarily due to the administration's early flirtation with industrial policy. However, this allowed him to turn to writing journalism for wider audiences, first for Fortune and Slate, later for The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, The Economist, Harper's, and Washington Monthly. In the early-1990's, he popularized the argument made by Laurence Lau and Alwyn Young, among others, that the growth of economies in East Asia were not the result of new and original economic models, but rather increased capital and labor inputs, which did not result in an increase in total factor productivity. His prediction was that future economic growth in East Asia would slow as it became more difficult to generate economic growth from increasing inputs.

In his own words, he became adept at "new kind of writing ... essays for non-economists that were clear, effective, and entertaining." Krugman had been considered a likely pick for a top economic policy post if John Kerry had won the 2004 presidential election.

Krugman worked on an advisory board for Enron throughout most of 1999, being paid $50,000 for attending two board meetings, before New York Times rules required him to resign before taking a job as a columnist. This became a source of controversy when the story of the Enron scandal broke, with critics accusing him of having a conflict of interest and the job of having been a bribe to control media coverage, charges he vehemently denies. He also notes that in later columns, he disclosed the past Enron relationship when he later wrote about the company ^*.

Since January 2000, he has contributed a twice-weekly column to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, which has made him, in the words of the Washington Monthly, "the most important political columnist in America... he is almost alone in analyzing the most important story in politics in recent years — the seamless melding of corporate, class, and political party interests at which the Bush administration excels."

In September, 2003, Krugman published a collection of his columns under the title, The Great Unraveling. It, taken as a whole, was a scathing attack on the Bush's administration's economic and foreign policies. His main argument was that the large deficits generated by the Bush administration — generated by decreasing taxes, maintaining public spending, and fighting a war in Iraq — were in the long run unsustainable, and would eventually generate a major economic crisis. The book was an immediate bestseller. Krugman combines a strong respect for the free market with a populist streak.

In the 1990s, Krugman's focus was on what can be described as policy economics, which he attempted to explain to the general audience in such works as Peddling Prosperity and columns attacking what he described as "policy entrepreneurs" who were focused single-mindedly on particular solutions, which they proposed as solving every conceivable crisis.

Paul Krugman's liberal economic theories recently earned him the #8 spot in Bernard Goldberg's book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America.

Criticisms

Krugman's high profile and his relentless criticism of policies associated with the Republican party have turned him into a lightning rod for intense criticism by his detractors. A November 13, 2003 article in The Economist cited political partisanship data compiled by blogger Ken Waight [http://www.lyinginponds.com/archives/2006/01/02/partisan-punditry-2005/, which shows that since the year 2000 Krugman has been arguably the most partisan newspaper columnist in America and almost certainly the columnist most uniformly supportive of the Democratic Party. The Economist article said in part: "A glance through his past columns reveals a growing tendency to attribute all the world's ills to George Bush. ... Even his economics is sometimes stretched. ... Overall, the effect is to give lay readers the illusion that Mr Krugman's perfectly respectable personal political beliefs can somehow be derived empirically from economic theory." In his May 22, 2005 farewell column, New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent wrote, "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults." Well-known critics of Krugman include Lawrence Kudlow and James Cramer of CNBC, who have criticized Krugman for his views against supply-side economics. On his TV program Mad Money, Cramer also voodooed Krugman as a "bubble head" by bursting a helium-inflated bubble marked "KRUGMAN" for complaining about a possible "housing bubble." Kudlow, who also works for National Review Online, has debated Krugman on the former CNBC TV show Kudlow & Cramer and on the last episode of Dylan Ratigan's Bullseye on March 11, 2005, and has frequently criticized him on his program Kudlow & Company. Also on CNBC on August 7, 2004 on Tim Russert's eponymous program, Bill O'Reilly confronted Krugman in a heated discussion, calling Krugman a "quasi-socialist". Krugman replied "And you take a look at anything I've written about economics, and I'm not a socialist. You know, that's a slander." When O'Reilly responded "I said quasi," Krugman retorted "Well, that's a wonderful, then you're a quasi-murderer...quasi is a pretty open thing." ^*

One critic, Donald Luskin, labeled Krugman's writings "error ridden" and "partisan." Luskin claims Krugman falsifies data and consciously incorrectly quotes his sources to manipulate a favorable view of his positions. Luskin's conclusions have themselves been criticized and Luskin's animus plus a surprise appearance at a book signing ^* prompted Krugman to call him a "stalker."

Bibliography

Authored or co-authored

Macroeconomics (with Robin Wells, February 2006) (ISBN 0716767635). Also available with student CDR (March 2006) (ISBN 0716767678).
Economics (with Robin Wells, December 2005)(ISBN 1572591501)
Krugman Wall Street Journal Sub Card (???) {ISBN 0716766973}
Microeconomics (with Robin Wells, March 2004) (ISBN 0716759977). Also available with student CDR (with Robin Wells, November 2004) (ISBN 0716767007) or with study guide (with Robin Wells, December 2004) (ISBN 071676699X).
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (September 2003) (ISBN 0393058506)
- A book of his New York Times columns, many of them dealing with Bush economic policies, some dealing with the economy in general.
International Economics: Theory and Policy (7th Edition) (2006) (ISBN 0321293835)
The New Trade Agenda (Foreign Affairs Editors' Choice) (December 2001) (ISBN 0876093020)
Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan (4 May 2001) (ISBN 0393050629)
The Spatial Economy - Cities, Regions and International Trade (with Masahisa Fujita, Anthony Venables)(July 1999, MIT press)(ISBN 0-262-06204-6)
The Return of Depression Economics (1 May 1999) (ISBN 039304839X)
- In this work Krugman considers the long economic stagnation of Japan through the 1990s, the Asian financial crisis, and problems in Latin America, and concludes that the generally accepted idea among economists that depressions can be prevented is no longer true.
The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science (1 May 1998) (ISBN 0393046389)
- A collection of Krugman's articles for various publications regarding the economy.
International Economics (March 1998) (ISBN 0673521869)
The Age of Diminished Expectations, Third Edition (8 August 1997) (ISBN 0262112248)
Competitiveness (1 January 1997)
Pop Internationalism (1 March 1996) (ISBN 0262112108)
Self Organizing Economy (1 February 1996) (ISBN 087609177X)
Emu and the Regions (December 1995) (ISBN 1567080383)
Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Ohlin Lectures) (15 September 1995) (ISBN 0262112035)
Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations (1 April 1995) (ISBN 0393312925)
- A book for those seeking to understand the history of economic thought from the time of the first rumblings of revolt against Keynesianism to the present. Written for the economics layman. Somewhat dense, but worthwhile in the opinion of some.
Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (3rd Edition) (1 February 1995) (ISBN 0881322040)
World Savings Shortage (1 September 1994) (ISBN 0881321613)
What Do We Need to Know About the International Monetary System? (Essays in International Finance, No 190 July 1993) (1 June 1993) (ISBN 0881650978)
Currencies and Crises (11 June 1992) (ISBN 0262111659)
Geography and Trade (Gaston Eyskens Lecture Series) (August 1991) (ISBN 0262111594)
The Risks Facing the World Economy (July 1991) (ISBN 1567080731)
Has the Adjustment Process Worked? (Policy Analyses in International Economics, 34) (1 June 1991) (ISBN 0881321168)
Rethinking International Trade (1 April 1990) (ISBN 0262111489)
Trade Policy and Market Structure (30 March 1989) (ISBN 0262081822)
Exchange-Rate Instability (Lionel Robbins Lectures) (2 November 1988) (ISBN 0262111403)
Adjustment in the World Economy (August 1987) (ISBN 1567080235)
Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics (January 1986) (ISBN 0262111128)
Market Structure and Foreign Trade: Increasing Returns, Imperfect Competition, and the International Economy (1 May 1985) (ISBN 0262081504)

Edited or co-edited

Currency Crises (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report) (1 September 2000) (ISBN 0226454622)
Trade with Japan : Has the Door Opened Wider? (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report) (1 March 1995) (ISBN 0226454592/)
Empirical Studies of Strategic Trade Policy (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report) (15 April 1994) (ISBN 0226454606)
Exchange Rate Targets and Currency Bands (October 1991) (ISBN 0521415330)

External links

New York Times Paul Krugman columns (now requires Times Select subscription)
The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive contains most if not every article ever written by Paul Krugman.
Paul Krugman (Princeton) which hasn't been updated since late 2003.
Paul Krugman (MIT) archives of his Slate and Fortune columns plus other writings 1996-2000
Open Directory Project - Paul Krugman directory category
The Economist - The one-handed economist Paul Krugman and the controversial art of popularising economics, 13 November 2003
Washington Monthly profile from December 2002.
Krugman's the man Paul Krugman's Op-Ed Columns from Times Select, started in March 2006.
The New Class War In America featuring Amy Goodman, Paul Krugman, Greg Palast and Randi Rhodes recorded on June 13, 2006 at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, mp3 format