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
Our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies — but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
I know that when I look at today's Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America. On the other side, however, open immigration can't coexist with a strong social safety net; if you're going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can't make that offer global. So Democrats have mixed feelings about immigration; in fact, it's an agonizing issue.
For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.
We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn't the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.
The planet will continue to cook.
If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.
The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America - a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It's probably worth pointing out that I'm not saying anything now that I wasn't saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there's nothing I've done in my life of which I'm more proud.
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. ... There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
Many people ... prefer to describe themselves as progressives rather than liberals. To some extent that's a response to the decades-long propaganda campaign conducted by movement conservatives, which has been quite successful in making Americans disdain the word liberal but much less successful in reducing support for liberal policies.
If Europe's example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don't drive them too much.
Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.