Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth28 February 1953
CityAlbany, NY
CountryUnited States of America
What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.
I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you're in late or latish middle age.
Anyone who thinks that the last 80 years, ever since FDR took us off gold, have been a doomed venture, that strikes me as kind of cranky.
I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.
You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.
People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.
The key reason executives are paid so much now is that they appoint the members of the corporate board that determines their compensation and control many of the perks that board members count on. So it's not the invisible hand of the market that leads to those monumental executive incomes; it's the invisible handshake in the boardroom.
Seven habits that help produce the anything-but-efficient markets that rule the world. 1. Think short term. 2. Be greedy. 3. Believe in the greater fool 4. Run with the herd. 5. Overgeneralize 6. Be trendy 7. Play with other people's money
[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.
These days, however, the main problem comes from the right - from conservatives who, unlike most economists, really do think that the free market is always right-to such an extent that they refuse to believe even the most overwhelming scientific evidence if it seems to suggest a justification for government action.
The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.
Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader.
Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.
Can we break the machine that is imposing right-wing radicalism on the United States? The scariest part is that the media is part of that machine.