Paul Krugman

The Krug shrugs and thinks, "ugh".

The dismal science
Economics

Economic systems

$  Free market
€  Social democracy
☭ Socialist economy

Major concepts

* New Deal
* Gross domestic product
* Federal Reserve
* Universal health care
* European Union

The worldly philosophers

* Adam Smith
* Bjørn Lomborg
* Max Weber
* Alexander Hamilton

v \- t \- e

“”The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

—Paul Krugman in 1998[1].

Paul Krugman (born 1953) is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for The New York Times. He is a social democrat who favours global free trade and criticized the Obama Administration for crafting an economic stimulus bill that was too modest to be effective. He opposes farm and ethanol subsidies and populist protectionism (of the sort espoused by Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan) and is a fierce critic of supply-side economics. Conservatives, of course, view him as a ~~dirty hippie who wants to give free steaks to the Greeks~~ mouthpiece for the liberal socialist agenda.[2] American libertarians also seem to believe he's the devil incarnate, to the point two of the foremost libertarians (Tom Woods and Rob Murphy) devote a show to "debunking" (read: repeating Austrian school garbage) his NYT op-eds. He gets most of his facts right too.[3] Unfortunately, while an economic expert, he is not the best at public speaking, once even losing in a debate with Ron Paul because he was unable to respond properly on live television.[4]

Some people with their sarcasm detectors turned off believe that Krugman is insane because of a 1978 paper he wrote on "interstellar economics." This is actually a parody if you can't tell after reading the first few lines.[5] It is generally agreed upon that cranky Krugman is the best Krugman.[6][7]

He also believes inflation is good.[8]

## Contents

* 1 Iraq War
* 2 Hate him? Let's strawman!
* 3 Quitting the New York Times
* 4 See also
* 5 Videos
* 6 External links
* 7 References

## Iraq War[edit]

Krugman was a prominent opponent of the Iraq War at a time when few other pundits were, including the liberal British newspaper The Guardian[9]. In his New York Times column on March 18, 2003 he wrote:

“”What scares me most, however, is the home front. Look at how this war happened. There is a case for getting tough with Iraq; bear in mind that an exasperated Clinton administration considered a bombing campaign in 1998. But it's not a case that the Bush administration ever made. Instead we got assertions about a nuclear program that turned out to be based on flawed or faked evidence; we got assertions about a link to Al Qaeda that people inside the intelligence services regard as nonsense. Yet those serial embarrassments went almost unreported by our domestic news media. So most Americans have no idea why the rest of the world doesn't trust the Bush administration's motives. And once the shooting starts, the already loud chorus that denounces any criticism as unpatriotic will become deafening.[10]

## Hate him? Let's strawman![edit]

As he's known for being one of a few economists to foresee the Great Recession, Krugman has become a victim of quote mining in recent years. Take this:

“”To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off.

Krugman was never advising the Fed to create the bubble, or saying it was a good idea.[11] But he was making a (unfortunately correct) prediction about how Greenspan would try to "fix" his mess.[12]

## Quitting the New York Times[edit]

After 25 years as an op-ed columnist at the New York Times Krugman quit. The Times published Krugman's top five favorite column picks, which included “Matters of Emphasis” “That Hissing Sound” “The Obama Gap” “After Reform Passes” and “Myths of Austerity.”[13] He explained why he left on the Contrarian Substack:

“”Two, previous Times management and editors had allowed me to engage in the higher-level economic debates of the time. The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis led to a great flowering of economics blogs. Important, sophisticated debates about the causes of the crisis and the policy response were taking place more or less in real time. I was able to be an active part of those debates, because I had an economics blog of my own, under the Times umbrella but separate from the column. The blog, unedited, was both more technical — sometimes much more technical — and looser than the column.

Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away. The Times eliminated the blog at the end of 2017. Here’s my last substantive blog post, which gives a good idea of the kind of thing I was no longer able to do once it was eliminated.

For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts. So in 2021 I opened a Substack account, as a place to put technical material I couldn’t publish in the Times. Times management became very upset. When I explained to them that I really, really needed an outlet where I could publish more analytical writing with charts etc., they agreed to allow me to have a Times newsletter (twice a week), where I could publish the kind of work I had previously posted on my blog.

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, “we are being lied into war.”

I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left.[14]

## See also[edit]

* Economic inequality
* Post-Keynesian economics \- Krugman is a near-perfect example of the difference between New Keynesians and Post-Keynesians, as seen in his scuffles with MMTers/chartalists.
* David Brooks \- His sworn enemy.

## Videos[edit]

* Contra Krugman.com \- Imagine waking up to find there's a weekly podcast all about how much they hate you. (And went on a cruise to socialize with other people who hate you)[No, not The Onion]

## External links[edit]

* Krugman's blog at the Times
* The Theory of Interstellar Trade
* Krugman funnies on Noahpinion
* Sucker'd.
* Here Are 5 Things Paul Krugman Says He Got Wrong Over The Years, Business Insider

## References[edit]

1. ↑ Paul Krugman Responds To All The People Throwing Around His Old Internet Quote
2. ↑ Forbes calls him "the socialist laureate." (So free trade is now socialist, apparently.)
3. ↑ PolitiFact on Krugman
4. ↑ On the Uselessness of Debates, The New York Times
5. ↑ "This research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Re-Elect William Proxmire."
6. ↑ According to Ezra Klein
7. ↑ Paul Krugman is Tired of Trying to Reason with You People, Brad DeLong
8. ↑ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/the-four-percent-solution/
9. ↑ Iraq: the case for decisive action (January 18, 2003) The Guardian (Retrieved February 24, 2025)
10. ↑ Things To Come] (March 18, 2003) Paul Krugman New York Times (Retrieved February 24, 2025)
11. ↑ Me and the Bubble, The New York Times
12. ↑ The full quote
13. ↑ Paul Krugman: After 25 Years, My Parting Words to Readers (December 17, 2024) Paul Krugman The New York Times (Retrieved February 24, 2025)
14. ↑ Departing the New York Times (January 28, 2025) Paul Krugman The Contrarian (Retrieved February 24, 2025)