Paul Krugman

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Paul Krugman

Paul Robin Krugman (born February 28, 1953) is an economist 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 well known in academia for his work on trade theory in providing a model in which firms and countries produce and trade because of economies of scale and for his textbook explanations of currency crises. He was also a critic of the new economy view of the late 1990's 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 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[1]—some of them academic, and some of them written for the layperson.

1 Biography
2 Awards
3 Criticism
4 Bibliography
- 4.1 Authored or co-authored
- 4.2 Edited or co-edited
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] 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 helped popularize 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 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.

He said that to answer Pop Internationalism, "I would have to write essays for non-economists that were clear, effective, and entertaining."

Krugman worked on an advisory board for Enron throughout most of 1999, being paid $37,500^[1] before New York Times rules required him to resign when he took a job as a columnist. He stated later it was to "[offer] Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues" and required him to "spend four days in Houston." However, when the story of the Enron scandal broke, critics accused him of having a conflict of interest and the job of having been a bribe to control media coverage, charges he denies. He points out that in columns written before and after the scandal, he disclosed his past Enron relationship when he wrote about the company.^[1]^[2]

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."^[3]

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, increasing 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.

An editorial column by Krugman triggered the Inequality Debate of 2006 in the blogosphere.

[edit] Awards

1991, American Economic Association, John Bates Clark Medal^[4]
2002, Editor and Publisher, Columnist of the Year^[5]
2004, Fundación Príncipe de Asturias (Spain), Prince of Asturias Awards in Social Sciences, the "European Pulitzer"^[6]

[edit] Criticism

A November 13, 2003 article in The Economist ^[7] reads: "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." Blogger Ken Waight uses a data analysis methodology at his Lying in Ponds website that ranks Krugman among the most partisan columnists.^[8] In his May 22, 2005 farewell column, New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent conceded, "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."^[9] Okrent did not originally provide specific examples for his view, but a few days later he returned from retirement into an email back-and-forth with Krugman, publicly hosted by the new ombudsman's column.^[10] Okrent's chief complaint (which may have been prompted by conservative commentator Donald Luskin) was that in a May 2004 column, Krugman inappropriately mixed numbers from the Establishment and Household employment data, without explaining to readers that these two surveys use differing, and incompatible, methods. Krugman, in fact, did not use any Household data. He did provide a number for the necessary monthly job creation in order for employment to pace population growth, which was based on Census data.^[11] However, this form of "mixing" data sources is uncontroversial -- the same methodology is used in numerous government and journalistic documents, including the Bush Administration's 2004 Economic Report of the President.^[12] The administration assumed a slightly lower rate of "adult non-elderly" population growth (perhaps justified by their proposals to restrict illegal immigration and implement a "guest worker" program that would have many adult non-elderly foreign workers leave the US after a few years of residence) but nonetheless came up with a very similar number: 110k per month, against Krugman's 140k.^[13]

On CNBC on August 7, 2004 on Tim Russert's eponymous television program, conservative commentator 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."^[14]

Critics of Krugman have historically accused him of a "shrill" rhetorical style,^[3]^[15]^[16] which led to the adoption by the liberal blogosphere of "shrill" as a term of praise for anyone offering an aggressive critique—partisan or not—of the Bush administration, Republicans, and conservatives in general. The conversion of the critique into humor arose originally from a conversation among J. Bradford DeLong, Tyler Cowen, and Andrew Northrup, three academic economics bloggers, and has its chief manifestation in a group blog entitled Shrillblog.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Authored or co-authored

Economics: European Edition (with Robin Wells and Kathryn Graddy, Spring 2007) (ISBN 0-7167-9956-1).
Macroeconomics (with Robin Wells, February 2006) (ISBN 0-7167-6763-5). Also available with student CDR (March 2006) (ISBN 0-7167-6767-8).
Economics (with Robin Wells, December 2005)(ISBN 1-57259-150-1)
Krugman Wall Street Journal Sub Card (???) {ISBN 0-7167-6697-3}
Microeconomics (with Robin Wells, March 2004) (ISBN 0-7167-5997-7). Also available with student CDR (with Robin Wells, November 2004) (ISBN 0-7167-6700-7) or with study guide (with Robin Wells, December 2004) (ISBN 0-7167-6699-X).
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (September 2003) (ISBN 0-393-05850-6)
- 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 0-321-29383-5)
The New Trade Agenda (Foreign Affairs Editors' Choice) (December 2001) (ISBN 0-87609-302-0)
Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan (4 May 2001) (ISBN 0-393-05062-9)
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 0-393-04839-X)
- 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 0-393-04638-9)
- A collection of Krugman's articles for various publications regarding the economy.
International Economics (March 1998) (ISBN 0-673-52186-9)
The Age of Diminished Expectations, Third Edition (8 August 1997) (ISBN 0-262-11224-8)
Competitiveness (1 January 1997)
Pop Internationalism (1 March 1996) (ISBN 0-262-11210-8)
Self Organizing Economy (1 February 1996) (ISBN 0-87609-177-X)
Emu and the Regions (December 1995) (ISBN 1-56708-038-3)
Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Ohlin Lectures) (15 September 1995) (ISBN 0-262-11203-5)
Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations (1 April 1995) (ISBN 0-393-31292-5)
- 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 0-88132-204-0)
World Savings Shortage (1 September 1994) (ISBN 0-88132-161-3)
What Do We Need to Know About the International Monetary System? (Essays in International Finance, No 190 July 1993) (1 June 1993) (ISBN 0-88165-097-8)
Currencies and Crises (11 June 1992) (ISBN 0-262-11165-9)
Geography and Trade (Gaston Eyskens Lecture Series) (August 1991) (ISBN 0-262-11159-4)
The Risks Facing the World Economy (July 1991) (ISBN 1-56708-073-1)
Has the Adjustment Process Worked? (Policy Analyses in International Economics, 34) (1 June 1991) (ISBN 0-88132-116-8)
Rethinking International Trade (1 April 1990) (ISBN 0-262-11148-9)
Trade Policy and Market Structure (30 March 1989) (ISBN 0-262-08182-2)
Exchange-Rate Instability (Lionel Robbins Lectures) (2 November 1988) (ISBN 0-262-11140-3)
Adjustment in the World Economy (August 1987) (ISBN 1-56708-023-5)
Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics (January 1986) (ISBN 0-262-11112-8)
Market Structure and Foreign Trade: Increasing Returns, Imperfect Competition, and the International Economy (1 May 1985) (ISBN 0-262-08150-4)

[edit] Edited or co-edited

Currency Crises (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report) (1 September 2000) (ISBN 0-226-45462-2)
Trade with Japan : Has the Door Opened Wider? (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report) (1 March 1995) (ISBN 0-226-45459-2/)
Empirical Studies of Strategic Trade Policy (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report) (15 April 1994) (ISBN 0-226-45460-6)
Exchange Rate Targets and Currency Bands (October 1991) (ISBN 0-521-41533-0)