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
The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.
as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.
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.
Wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing - correctly - that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created would turn on its creators as well as the little people.
There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way - and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.
But where will the Fed find another bubble?
Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?
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.
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.
[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.
I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, more or less - in which case, who imagines that insurance claims will be honored?
It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.
There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.
I think if you're a liberal, you believe that we all are, at least to some extent, our brothers' keepers, you really believe that we have a sumptuary responsibility to make sure that life is decent for everybody in America, that you believe that society out to be broadly shared, and you believe that you can't have a real democracy unless you have a little bit, at least, of economic democracy.