Paul Krugman

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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 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 [1] books — some of them academic, and some of them written for the layperson. His International Economics: Theory and Policy is a standard textbook on international economics. 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.

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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 before resigning to take 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 he disclosed the past Enron relationship when he later wrote about the company [2].

Since January 2000, he has contributed a twice-weekly column to the Opinion/Editorial 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. Krugman was the main architect of the zero interest rate policy.

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Criticisms

Krugman's high profile and his unwavering support of the Democratic Party have turned him into a target of heavy criticism by his detractors, as well as praise from a loyal band of fans. A November 13, 2003 article in The Economist [3] cited political partisanship data compiled by blogger Ken Waight [4], 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." [5]

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Bibliography

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See also

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External links

de:Paul Krugman el:Πωλ Κρούγκμαν es:Paul Krugman fr:Paul Krugman ja:ポール・クルーグマン pt:Paul Krugman

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