I went to MIT, SB Physics, but a half dozen courses at Sloan. Notably, then Macro taught by Samuelson, with TA Paul Krugman occaisionally for something I forget. So how could I be a fan of the Austrians, Freidman, and various "curve fitting, data and boundary adjusting" conservative economists. Most who obviously placed "agenda" over "scientific method" and "objective analysis". Here is an autobiography from Krugman: https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/incidents.html
You illustrate the two greatest things about Paul Krugman. It takes great comprehension to correctly and properly simplify complex technical things. I think you also have this Noah.
Secondly, Krugman who has a very high perch in the Economic field, is open to change, new data, new analysis, being wrong and not holding on. This is extraordinary.
Factoid of small interest. Ben Netay, the name Benjamin Netanyahu used while at MIT, also was in classes at Sloan. We spoke, but not that I recall in an Econ class. Robert Solow remembers him.
I was there a couple of years after you. My Intro to Macro to Macro textbook was Dornbusch and Fisher, copywriter 1978, which I bought at the Tech Coop in December 1977. Though Krugman was gone by then, the economics I learned at MIT was effect preparation for reading Krugman during the Great Recession.
I enjoyed this very much. I have been a fan of Krug man for decades, before he even before he started writing for the Times. But I am most the most grateful for was his willingness to point out that the administration of George W. Bush was often flat out lying to us, when most people were unwilling to accept that the President would do that. Sometimes I felt like I was crazy as apparently no else noticed, so when Krugman did and said so, that meant a lot.
Great piece, Noah. As you note, one of Prof Krugman’s most distinctive habits was that he actually admitted when he was wrong, and then assessed with brutal clarity why he missed. That alone is a noteworthy contribution. I also liked when he categorized the relative wonkiness of his off-cycle NYT posts. His voice will be missed in the coming great macro debates of the second Trump administration. Wait, tariffs are actually inflationary?
Hopefully, he will come out of retirement and write a piece if Trump gives him sufficient provocation. “Help us, Paul Krugman, you're one of our few hopes.”
Krugman is a great economist and phenomenal writer, but unfortunately he has increasingly opted to apply his talents to pugilistic partisanship over the past few decades. As one of America's leading public intellectuals he has probably done as much as anyone to bring about the mud wrestling match that currently characterizes our public discourse.
"As one of America's leading public intellectuals he has probably done as much as anyone to bring about the mud wrestling match that currently characterizes our public discourse." <-- I strongly disagree on that point, but I do think he drifted toward writing too much about politics in his later years. As you know I am not averse to writing about politics on an econ blog, but I don't think it should take over from the econ content.
I think some of his most beautiful writing was when he veered away from economics to discuss more philosophical, historical, or political ideas. I will agree he went a little off the deep end when George W was elected and started public lies and elisions selling an enormous unfunded tax cut and then the Iraq invasion. This seems to have sparked Krugman’s anger in a way that forever affected his subsequent writing.
Krugman's language was uncharacteristically (for a genteel pundit) blunt. But he could also argue that using watered down language would serve to water down the seriousness of the issues with the Bush Administration's actions. He wasn't really wrong. The Bush Administration DID tell lies to justify going to war. Later, people like Paul Ryan DID dress up what amounted to magic asterisks in the clothes of serious analysis, and Krugman bluntly pointed out what they did. Was it perhaps impolite? Sure. Does dishonesty justify it? Perhaps, maybe even probably. I guess the bottom line is you're in a tough spot between maintaining decorum and that decorum being interpreted as granting legitimacy to practices that don't merit it.
I know this is econ focused but never forget what the world was like in 2002 and especially the world of the nations comment pages, completely dominated by Bush Admin thinking. Krugman was the one voice prepared to say clearly and without caveat that Iraq was going to be a disaster and that the fact it was Bush pushing it was sure to exacerbate what was a bad idea anyway
People now are amazed to discover how lonely the holders of that position felt at the time and he was the one major voice in a major publication who stood strong in his views
David Brooks cover story in the weekly standard about internal traitors (basically if you opposed the Iraq War you were a 5th column) had a cartoon cover that had a very obvious Krugman caricature as part of the image promoting the piece
"The pervasive, ever-present power of this internal hierarchy is something you really have to have existed inside the econ profession in order to understand."
I am a research scientist and this is exactly the same in science! If you are not a star, nothing innovative or challenging you say, even if you are backing it up by evidence, will matter, because you won't get funded, you won't get published, etc.
“Rhetorical skill,”’indeed. Krugman struck a tone with his writing, such that you recognized his voice. It was as though he was talking with you while sitting on a park bench. His economic bona fides are clear. What Krugman had in spades was capital C character. He was comfortable in his own skin and owned his mistakes. That is a rare character trait in this day and age.
Krugman is a remarkable and somewhat unique public intellectual. He’s probably the single individual who shaped my interest in economics when the economy melted down in 2008.
Most notably, Krugman shows his work, and he provides useful and falsifiable hypotheses that show the assumptions underlying his thinking. When you read Krugman, you can grasp why he believes what he does. If his predictions go wrong, you can, by looking at the data, see which assumptions didn’t hold up.
It’s incredibly useful in a profession that purports to explain how the world works to a substantial degree, but where the ability to build mathematically complex models had become prioritized over actually coherently explaining the economy. A shortage of aggregate demand in a babysitting coop makes much more sense as a way of explaining mass unemployment than a tenth of the workforce deciding to take a simultaneous vacation in 2009.
And that, I think, is the gift that will stay with us— when writing about the economy, or anything, clarity is king. Krugman’s intellectual clarity really revolutionized how I think not just professionals but laypeople think about the economy. That will be missed (though I think we lost quite a bit when he retired his Times blog in favor of back of the envelope musings on Twitter.
I am one of those people who discovered you while reading Paul Krugman’s blog. I unwisely skipped economics in college and learned a tremendous amount from him, for which I will be forever grateful.
When it comes to getting predictions wrong, we shouldn't forget about this quote from Krugman: “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.”
Metcalf's law is wrong in practice. The value of social networks tends to increase as N log N, rather than N^2. This is because some people participate more than others, and because some people are trolls and spammers that provide negative value.
Great article, Noah. Macro Wars were exciting as well as clarifying. I'm glad you were there along with others. Some of us look upon The Conscience of a Liberal probably as many comedians view the John Stewart show. Also, Flavors of Fraud was another one of
those Krugman articles that clarified immediately what was going on with the accounting scandals early this century. The NYT will probably be worse off without Krugman. Can't imagine a replacement.
Thanks! I’ve been following crypto scene for a while and there Krugman was the punch bag for all things wrong with ‘fiat’. Glad there is a bigger picture
I am not learned enough to comment on of Krugman's Nobel. What I will comment on is Paul Krugman's demagogic progressivism.
He once said Deficits don't matter. He has since changed his mind. Oops my bad
His pronouncements and columns are preachy. He is precisely why many have disdain for college professors. As I look at our youth, especially those who went to university, I also disdain them.
We have praise for the murderer of a young father who was doing the job of CEO. He is suddenly a hero. Those college kids praising terrorists. Something is seriously wrong with our youth and people like Krugman may partially be responsible.
This is entirely wrong, in an illustrative way. He wrote in 2009-2012 or so that deficits didn't matter. He was entirely right. But the point he made was that deficits didn't matter THEN; when push came to shove, he explicitly said that deficits don't matter in deep recessions. He pointed out that, in times of close to full employment, they do matter. This put him at odds with dogmatic self-proclaimed progressives like the MMT people. You can find that here: (https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/deficits-and-the-printing-press-somewhat-wonkish/). It's quite common, though, for Krugman's critics to attribute positions to him that he doesn't come close to taking. That's one example. Pinning internet leftists celebrating the United CEO's murder on him is another.
You understand I disagree with almost of his writings on political and political tangent subjects. He is not my cup of tea but he is a radical leftist.
He is a professor. What influence his profession has had on this younger generation has produced some poor humans who have become sociopaths. That is not debatable. I cannot disagree with your skepticism of the connection. I understand. You should also try and understand my position. People disagree.
"What influence his profession has had on this younger generation has produced some poor humans who have become sociopaths. That is not debatable." It IS debatable!! Support your position with logic and evidence rather than just proclaiming it to be truth. As you say, people disagree.
You don't have to share his politics. People do disagree. I'm pointing out where your post was objectively wrong. You declared that he said that deficits don't matter. He explicitly explained the circumstances under which deficits do and don't matter. That's not him changing his mind; that's you misstating his position completely. He's also not a radical leftist. He's quite a mainstream center-left economist. He's not even close to the most progressive Nobel-winning public intellectual economist with a beard; Joe Stiglitz is quite a bit more progressive than Krugman is. It's also entirely wrong to blame a nutjob shooting someone in the street on him. That's not debatable, but it's not debatable in that you're attributing murderous sociopathy on someone who has shown exactly zero sign of that. In both of these cases, these aren't things to "agree to disagree" on; they're just cases where your post is completely wrong, in the latter case in a dangerous way.
a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
The murderous killer has no conscience. None. I perfectly fine of how Krugman strikes me. I don't remember him discussion the second part of the calculation at the same time as he was covering for Obama's spending and fiscal policy leading to deficits and debt. He only discussed this later; otherwise, why the whole world remember that he said deficits don't matter. My condemnation of professors is that they clearly have not produced caring sympathetic humans. I find it odd that anyone would think embracing and murderer who planned this would be considered a hero. Perhaps if it was Hitler we could have a discussion. Otherwise this kid also have no conscience. As for the other produced miscreants embracing terrorists you can decide for yourself if they are sociopaths.
I explicitly linked you to where he said that deficits don't matter under some circumstances. That was in 2011. The reason some people don't remember it is that some people don't actually read the people they purport to criticize. Again, this isn't debatable. The link is right there in my post. I'll even re-post it below. In this case, what you should do is recognize that what you remember is entirely wrong, think about why it's entirely wrong, and change your view. You don't get any points for being confronted with incontrovertible evidence and doubling down. Similarly, while, yes, we have a disturbing amount of political violence, it's neither new nor in some way attributable to columnists you don't like. There's nothing anywhere in Krugman's writing that suggests that he supports or promotes political violence. You declaring it is just... again, wrong. Again, you're entitled to your politics. You're not entitled to your own facts. Here, you're just objectively wrong. It's good to change your mind when confronted with that. https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/deficits-and-the-printing-press-somewhat-wonkish/
I didn't say he promoted political violence. Do not put words in my mouth.
I said he and his ilk have promoted beliefs in this generation that have turned them in to citizens with little empathy bordering on not having a conscience. He has never promoted political violence but he has promoted progressivism. This is the result of those teachings at our universities. A progressive District Attorney has more regard for criminals than victims. I'd say they are sociopaths harming the poorest among us by allowing crime to occur with no consequences. That is sociopathic behavior. Preaching progressives ideology has left America with sociopaths. They are uncaring.
I went to MIT, SB Physics, but a half dozen courses at Sloan. Notably, then Macro taught by Samuelson, with TA Paul Krugman occaisionally for something I forget. So how could I be a fan of the Austrians, Freidman, and various "curve fitting, data and boundary adjusting" conservative economists. Most who obviously placed "agenda" over "scientific method" and "objective analysis". Here is an autobiography from Krugman: https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/incidents.html
You illustrate the two greatest things about Paul Krugman. It takes great comprehension to correctly and properly simplify complex technical things. I think you also have this Noah.
Secondly, Krugman who has a very high perch in the Economic field, is open to change, new data, new analysis, being wrong and not holding on. This is extraordinary.
Factoid of small interest. Ben Netay, the name Benjamin Netanyahu used while at MIT, also was in classes at Sloan. We spoke, but not that I recall in an Econ class. Robert Solow remembers him.
https://news.mit.edu/1996/netanyahu-0605
Thanks Noah for the awesome perspective on Paul Krugman.
I was there a couple of years after you. My Intro to Macro to Macro textbook was Dornbusch and Fisher, copywriter 1978, which I bought at the Tech Coop in December 1977. Though Krugman was gone by then, the economics I learned at MIT was effect preparation for reading Krugman during the Great Recession.
I enjoyed this very much. I have been a fan of Krug man for decades, before he even before he started writing for the Times. But I am most the most grateful for was his willingness to point out that the administration of George W. Bush was often flat out lying to us, when most people were unwilling to accept that the President would do that. Sometimes I felt like I was crazy as apparently no else noticed, so when Krugman did and said so, that meant a lot.
Great piece, Noah. As you note, one of Prof Krugman’s most distinctive habits was that he actually admitted when he was wrong, and then assessed with brutal clarity why he missed. That alone is a noteworthy contribution. I also liked when he categorized the relative wonkiness of his off-cycle NYT posts. His voice will be missed in the coming great macro debates of the second Trump administration. Wait, tariffs are actually inflationary?
Hopefully, he will come out of retirement and write a piece if Trump gives him sufficient provocation. “Help us, Paul Krugman, you're one of our few hopes.”
Krugman is a great economist and phenomenal writer, but unfortunately he has increasingly opted to apply his talents to pugilistic partisanship over the past few decades. As one of America's leading public intellectuals he has probably done as much as anyone to bring about the mud wrestling match that currently characterizes our public discourse.
"As one of America's leading public intellectuals he has probably done as much as anyone to bring about the mud wrestling match that currently characterizes our public discourse." <-- I strongly disagree on that point, but I do think he drifted toward writing too much about politics in his later years. As you know I am not averse to writing about politics on an econ blog, but I don't think it should take over from the econ content.
I think some of his most beautiful writing was when he veered away from economics to discuss more philosophical, historical, or political ideas. I will agree he went a little off the deep end when George W was elected and started public lies and elisions selling an enormous unfunded tax cut and then the Iraq invasion. This seems to have sparked Krugman’s anger in a way that forever affected his subsequent writing.
Krugman's language was uncharacteristically (for a genteel pundit) blunt. But he could also argue that using watered down language would serve to water down the seriousness of the issues with the Bush Administration's actions. He wasn't really wrong. The Bush Administration DID tell lies to justify going to war. Later, people like Paul Ryan DID dress up what amounted to magic asterisks in the clothes of serious analysis, and Krugman bluntly pointed out what they did. Was it perhaps impolite? Sure. Does dishonesty justify it? Perhaps, maybe even probably. I guess the bottom line is you're in a tough spot between maintaining decorum and that decorum being interpreted as granting legitimacy to practices that don't merit it.
I know this is econ focused but never forget what the world was like in 2002 and especially the world of the nations comment pages, completely dominated by Bush Admin thinking. Krugman was the one voice prepared to say clearly and without caveat that Iraq was going to be a disaster and that the fact it was Bush pushing it was sure to exacerbate what was a bad idea anyway
People now are amazed to discover how lonely the holders of that position felt at the time and he was the one major voice in a major publication who stood strong in his views
Yeah. I was in college and then living in Japan after that, and I remember thinking how refreshing it was to have one sane voice in the wilderness.
David Brooks cover story in the weekly standard about internal traitors (basically if you opposed the Iraq War you were a 5th column) had a cartoon cover that had a very obvious Krugman caricature as part of the image promoting the piece
"The pervasive, ever-present power of this internal hierarchy is something you really have to have existed inside the econ profession in order to understand."
I am a research scientist and this is exactly the same in science! If you are not a star, nothing innovative or challenging you say, even if you are backing it up by evidence, will matter, because you won't get funded, you won't get published, etc.
Krugman has a great Sci-Fi novel in him if he chooses to spend his semi retirement writing one.
“Rhetorical skill,”’indeed. Krugman struck a tone with his writing, such that you recognized his voice. It was as though he was talking with you while sitting on a park bench. His economic bona fides are clear. What Krugman had in spades was capital C character. He was comfortable in his own skin and owned his mistakes. That is a rare character trait in this day and age.
Krugman is a remarkable and somewhat unique public intellectual. He’s probably the single individual who shaped my interest in economics when the economy melted down in 2008.
Most notably, Krugman shows his work, and he provides useful and falsifiable hypotheses that show the assumptions underlying his thinking. When you read Krugman, you can grasp why he believes what he does. If his predictions go wrong, you can, by looking at the data, see which assumptions didn’t hold up.
It’s incredibly useful in a profession that purports to explain how the world works to a substantial degree, but where the ability to build mathematically complex models had become prioritized over actually coherently explaining the economy. A shortage of aggregate demand in a babysitting coop makes much more sense as a way of explaining mass unemployment than a tenth of the workforce deciding to take a simultaneous vacation in 2009.
And that, I think, is the gift that will stay with us— when writing about the economy, or anything, clarity is king. Krugman’s intellectual clarity really revolutionized how I think not just professionals but laypeople think about the economy. That will be missed (though I think we lost quite a bit when he retired his Times blog in favor of back of the envelope musings on Twitter.
Krugman got me into economics. Forever indebted to him. ♥️
I think I first read your name in a Krugman post back then! This is a lovely and generous tribute and good to see.
I am one of those people who discovered you while reading Paul Krugman’s blog. I unwisely skipped economics in college and learned a tremendous amount from him, for which I will be forever grateful.
When it comes to getting predictions wrong, we shouldn't forget about this quote from Krugman: “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.”
;)
Check the footnotes of my post!
Metcalf's law is wrong in practice. The value of social networks tends to increase as N log N, rather than N^2. This is because some people participate more than others, and because some people are trolls and spammers that provide negative value.
Great article, Noah. Macro Wars were exciting as well as clarifying. I'm glad you were there along with others. Some of us look upon The Conscience of a Liberal probably as many comedians view the John Stewart show. Also, Flavors of Fraud was another one of
those Krugman articles that clarified immediately what was going on with the accounting scandals early this century. The NYT will probably be worse off without Krugman. Can't imagine a replacement.
Thanks! I’ve been following crypto scene for a while and there Krugman was the punch bag for all things wrong with ‘fiat’. Glad there is a bigger picture
I am not learned enough to comment on of Krugman's Nobel. What I will comment on is Paul Krugman's demagogic progressivism.
He once said Deficits don't matter. He has since changed his mind. Oops my bad
His pronouncements and columns are preachy. He is precisely why many have disdain for college professors. As I look at our youth, especially those who went to university, I also disdain them.
We have praise for the murderer of a young father who was doing the job of CEO. He is suddenly a hero. Those college kids praising terrorists. Something is seriously wrong with our youth and people like Krugman may partially be responsible.
This is entirely wrong, in an illustrative way. He wrote in 2009-2012 or so that deficits didn't matter. He was entirely right. But the point he made was that deficits didn't matter THEN; when push came to shove, he explicitly said that deficits don't matter in deep recessions. He pointed out that, in times of close to full employment, they do matter. This put him at odds with dogmatic self-proclaimed progressives like the MMT people. You can find that here: (https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/deficits-and-the-printing-press-somewhat-wonkish/). It's quite common, though, for Krugman's critics to attribute positions to him that he doesn't come close to taking. That's one example. Pinning internet leftists celebrating the United CEO's murder on him is another.
You understand I disagree with almost of his writings on political and political tangent subjects. He is not my cup of tea but he is a radical leftist.
He is a professor. What influence his profession has had on this younger generation has produced some poor humans who have become sociopaths. That is not debatable. I cannot disagree with your skepticism of the connection. I understand. You should also try and understand my position. People disagree.
"What influence his profession has had on this younger generation has produced some poor humans who have become sociopaths. That is not debatable." It IS debatable!! Support your position with logic and evidence rather than just proclaiming it to be truth. As you say, people disagree.
You don't have to share his politics. People do disagree. I'm pointing out where your post was objectively wrong. You declared that he said that deficits don't matter. He explicitly explained the circumstances under which deficits do and don't matter. That's not him changing his mind; that's you misstating his position completely. He's also not a radical leftist. He's quite a mainstream center-left economist. He's not even close to the most progressive Nobel-winning public intellectual economist with a beard; Joe Stiglitz is quite a bit more progressive than Krugman is. It's also entirely wrong to blame a nutjob shooting someone in the street on him. That's not debatable, but it's not debatable in that you're attributing murderous sociopathy on someone who has shown exactly zero sign of that. In both of these cases, these aren't things to "agree to disagree" on; they're just cases where your post is completely wrong, in the latter case in a dangerous way.
Sociopath;
a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
The murderous killer has no conscience. None. I perfectly fine of how Krugman strikes me. I don't remember him discussion the second part of the calculation at the same time as he was covering for Obama's spending and fiscal policy leading to deficits and debt. He only discussed this later; otherwise, why the whole world remember that he said deficits don't matter. My condemnation of professors is that they clearly have not produced caring sympathetic humans. I find it odd that anyone would think embracing and murderer who planned this would be considered a hero. Perhaps if it was Hitler we could have a discussion. Otherwise this kid also have no conscience. As for the other produced miscreants embracing terrorists you can decide for yourself if they are sociopaths.
I explicitly linked you to where he said that deficits don't matter under some circumstances. That was in 2011. The reason some people don't remember it is that some people don't actually read the people they purport to criticize. Again, this isn't debatable. The link is right there in my post. I'll even re-post it below. In this case, what you should do is recognize that what you remember is entirely wrong, think about why it's entirely wrong, and change your view. You don't get any points for being confronted with incontrovertible evidence and doubling down. Similarly, while, yes, we have a disturbing amount of political violence, it's neither new nor in some way attributable to columnists you don't like. There's nothing anywhere in Krugman's writing that suggests that he supports or promotes political violence. You declaring it is just... again, wrong. Again, you're entitled to your politics. You're not entitled to your own facts. Here, you're just objectively wrong. It's good to change your mind when confronted with that. https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/deficits-and-the-printing-press-somewhat-wonkish/
I didn't say he promoted political violence. Do not put words in my mouth.
I said he and his ilk have promoted beliefs in this generation that have turned them in to citizens with little empathy bordering on not having a conscience. He has never promoted political violence but he has promoted progressivism. This is the result of those teachings at our universities. A progressive District Attorney has more regard for criminals than victims. I'd say they are sociopaths harming the poorest among us by allowing crime to occur with no consequences. That is sociopathic behavior. Preaching progressives ideology has left America with sociopaths. They are uncaring.