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
Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can't find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they're offering. Almost always it turns out what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage. No wonder they come up short.
Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups
...instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.
I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.
A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.
Most people, I suspect, still have in their minds an image of America as the great land of college education, unique in the extent to which higher learning is offered to the population at large. That image used to correspond to reality. But these days young Americans are considerably less likely than young people in many other countries to graduate from college. In fact, we have a college graduation rate that's slightly below the average across all advanced economies.
The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.
Raising the minimum wage and lowering the barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off - higher unemployment. A better idea is to have the government subsidize low-wage employment. The earned-income tax credit for low-income workers - which has been the object of proposed cuts by both President Clinton and congressional Republicans - has been a positive step in this direction.
Generous unemployment benefits can increase both structural and frictional unemployment. So government policies intended to help workers can have the undesirable side effect of raising the natural rate of unemployment.
People respond to incentives. If unemployment becomes more attractive because of the unemployment benefit, some unemployed workers may no longer try to find a job or may not try to find one as quickly as they would without the benefit.
The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.
The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.
However, the fact that an economist offers a theoretical analysis does not and should not automatically command respect. What is needed is some assurance that the analysis is actually relevant.
We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.