107 Facts About Paul Krugman

Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a columnist for The New York Times.

In 2008, Krugman was the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography.

The Prize Committee cited Paul Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.

Paul Krugman was previously a professor of economics at MIT, and, later, at Princeton University.

Paul Krugman retired from Princeton in June 2015, and holds the title of professor emeritus there.

Paul Krugman holds the title of Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.

Paul Krugman was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010, and is among the most influential economists in the world.

Paul Krugman is known in academia for his work on international economics, economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises.

Paul Krugman is the author or editor of 27 books, including scholarly works, textbooks, and books for a more general audience, and has published over 200 scholarly articles in professional journals and edited volumes.

Paul Krugman has written several hundred columns on economic and political issues for The New York Times, Fortune and Slate.

Paul Krugman considers himself a modern liberal, referring to his books, his blog on The New York Times, and his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal.

Paul Krugman was born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, the son of Anita and David Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman was born in Albany, New York, spent several years of his childhood in the Upstate city of Utica, before growing up from age eight in Merrick, a hamlet in Nassau County.

Paul Krugman graduated from John F Kennedy High School in Bellmore.

Since present-day science fell far short of "psychohistory", Paul Krugman turned to economics as the next best thing.

Paul Krugman then went on to pursue a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Paul Krugman later praised his PhD thesis advisor, Rudi Dornbusch, as "one of the great economics teachers of all time" and said that he "had the knack of inspiring students to pick up his enthusiasm and technique, but find their own paths".

In 1978, Paul Krugman presented a number of ideas to Dornbusch, who flagged as interesting the idea of a monopolistically competitive trade model.

Encouraged, Paul Krugman worked on it and later wrote, "[I] knew within a few hours that I had the key to my whole career in hand".

In that same year, Paul Krugman wrote "The Theory of Interstellar Trade", a tongue-in-cheek essay on computing interest rates on goods in transit near the speed of light.

Paul Krugman says he wrote it to cheer himself up when he was "an oppressed assistant professor".

Paul Krugman became an assistant professor at Yale University in September 1977.

From 1982 to 1983, Paul Krugman spent a year working at the Reagan White House as a staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Paul Krugman rejoined MIT as a full professor in 1984.

Paul Krugman has taught at Stanford, Yale, and the London School of Economics.

In 2000, Paul Krugman joined Princeton University as Professor of Economics and International Affairs.

Paul Krugman is currently Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and a member of the Group of Thirty international economic body.

Paul Krugman has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1979.

Paul Krugman was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010.

Paul Krugman has written extensively on international economics, including international trade, economic geography, and international finance.

Paul Krugman's International Economics: Theory and Policy, co-authored with Maurice Obstfeld, is a standard undergraduate textbook on international economics.

Paul Krugman is co-author, with Robin Wells, of an undergraduate economics text which he says was strongly inspired by the first edition of Paul Samuelson's classic textbook.

Paul Krugman writes on economic topics for the general public, sometimes on international economic topics but on income distribution and public policy.

Paul Krugman modeled a 'preference for diversity' by assuming a CES utility function like that in a 1977 paper by Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz.

Many models of international trade now follow Paul Krugman's lead, incorporating economies of scale in production and a preference for diversity in consumption.

Paul Krugman's theory took into account transportation costs, a key feature in producing the "home market effect", which would later feature in his work on the new economic geography.

The home market effect was an unexpected result, and Paul Krugman initially questioned it, but ultimately concluded that the mathematics of the model were correct.

Paul Krugman has usually been supportive of free trade and globalization.

Paul Krugman has been critical of industrial policy, which New Trade Theory suggests might offer nations rent-seeking advantages if "strategic industries" can be identified, saying it's not clear that such identification can be done accurately enough to matter.

Paul Krugman called the paper "the love of my life in academic work".

The "home market effect" that Paul Krugman discovered in NTT features in NEG, which interprets agglomeration "as the outcome of the interaction of increasing returns, trade costs and factor price differences".

Paul Krugman has been influential in the field of international finance.

Paul Krugman adapted their model for the foreign exchange market, resulting in a 1979 paper on currency crises in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, which showed that misaligned fixed exchange rate regimes are unlikely to end smoothly but instead end in a sudden speculative attack.

Paul Krugman's paper is considered one of the main contributions to the 'first generation' of currency crisis models, and it is his second-most-cited paper.

Paul Krugman first announced that he was working on such a model on his blog, on October 5,2008.

Paul Krugman has done much to revive discussion of the liquidity trap as a topic in economics.

Paul Krugman recommended pursuing aggressive fiscal policy and unconventional monetary policy to counter Japan's lost decade in the 1990s, arguing that the country was mired in a Keynesian liquidity trap.

Paul Krugman had argued in The Return of Depression Economics that Japan was in a liquidity trap in the late 1990s, since the central bank could not drop interest rates any lower to escape economic stagnation.

Paul Krugman has since drawn parallels between Japan's 'lost decade' and the late 2000s recession, arguing that expansionary fiscal policy is necessary as the major industrialized economies are mired in a liquidity trap.

Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the sole recipient for 2008.

Paul Krugman was correct in 15 out of 17 predictions, compared to 9 out of 11 for the next most accurate media figure, Maureen Dowd.

Paul Krugman was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.

In September 2003, Paul Krugman published a collection of his columns under the title, The Great Unraveling, about the Bush administration's economic and foreign policies and the US economy in the early 2000s.

Paul Krugman's columns argued that the large deficits during that time were generated by the Bush administration as a result of decreasing taxes on the rich, increasing public spending, and fighting the Iraq War.

Paul Krugman wrote that these policies were unsustainable in the long run and would eventually generate a major economic crisis.

In 2007, Paul Krugman published The Conscience of a Liberal, whose title refers to Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative.

In Conscience, Paul Krugman argues that government policies played a much greater role than commonly thought both in reducing inequality in the 1930s through 1970s and in increasing it in the 1980s through the present, and criticizes the Bush administration for implementing policies that Paul Krugman believes widened the gap between the rich and poor.

Paul Krugman argued that Republicans owed their electoral successes to their ability to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South.

Paul Krugman argues that Ronald Reagan had used the "Southern Strategy" to signal sympathy for racism without saying anything overtly racist, citing as an example Reagan's coining of the term "welfare queen".

In late 2008, Paul Krugman published a substantial updating of an earlier work, entitled The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.

Martin Wolf has written that Paul Krugman is both the "most hated and most admired columnist in the US".

Economist J Peter Neary has noted that Krugman "has written on a wide range of topics, always combining one of the best prose styles in the profession with an ability to construct elegant, insightful and useful models".

In 1999, near the height of the dot com boom, The New York Times approached Paul Krugman to write a bi-weekly column on "the vagaries of business and economics in an age of prosperity".

Paul Krugman's column provoked an angry response and The New York Times was flooded with complaints.

Paul Krugman was noteworthy for his fierce opposition to the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.

Later, Paul Krugman wrote an article which accused Sanders of "[going] for easy slogans over hard thinking" and attacking Hillary Clinton in a way that was "just plain dishonest".

In June 2021, Paul Krugman wrote an article titled, "Yellen's New Alliance Against Leprechauns".

Paul Krugman has remarked several times on how Trump tempts him to assume the worst, such that he has to be careful to check his personal beliefs against the weight of evidence.

Paul Krugman argued that their rise was fueled by mobilizing resources and that their growth rates would inevitably slow.

Paul Krugman's article helped popularize the argument made by Lawrence Lau and Alwyn Young, among others, that the growth of economies in East Asia was not the result of new and original economic models, but rather from high capital investment and increasing labor force participation, and that total factor productivity had not increased.

Paul Krugman argued that in the long term, only increasing total factor productivity can lead to sustained economic growth.

Paul Krugman's article was highly criticized in many Asian countries when it first appeared, and subsequent studies disputed some of Paul Krugman's conclusions.

Paul Krugman advocated lower interest rates, and increased government spending on infrastructure, military, and unemployment benefits, arguing that these policies would have a larger stimulus effect, and unlike permanent tax cuts, would only temporarily increase the budget deficit.

Paul Krugman has been critical of some of the Obama administration's economic policies.

Paul Krugman has criticized China's exchange rate policy, which he believes to be a significant drag on global economic recovery from the Late-2000s recession, and he has advocated a "surcharge" on Chinese imports to the US in response.

Jeremy Warner of The Daily Telegraph accused Paul Krugman of advocating a return to self-destructive protectionism.

Paul Krugman claimed that these efforts could lead the global economy into the early stages of a "third depression" and leave "millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs".

Paul Krugman advocated instead the continued stimulus of economies to foster greater growth.

In 2015, Paul Krugman noted his ambivalence about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, as the agreement was not mainly about trade and, "whatever you may say about the benefits of free trade, most of those benefits have already been realized" [by existing agreements].

Paul Krugman noted that if there is a trade war, imports would decrease as much as exports, so employment should not be strongly impacted, at least in the medium to long run.

Paul Krugman believes that the US should not repeat Reagan's 1981 policy on taxes and quotas on imported products, as even if it does not produce a recession, protectionism would shock "value chains" and disrupt jobs and communities in the same way as free trade in the past.

Paul Krugman recommended against the abandonment of NAFTA, because it could cause economic losses and disruptions to businesses, jobs, and communities.

Paul Krugman has called for a transition to a green economy.

Paul Krugman criticized Democratic "moderates" and corporations "torpedoing efforts to avoid a civilization-threatening crisis because you want to hold down your tax bill".

Paul Krugman describes himself as liberal, and has explained that he views the term "liberal" in the American context to mean "more or less what social democratic means in Europe".

Paul Krugman has at times advocated free markets in contexts where they are often viewed as controversial.

Paul Krugman has written against rent control and land-use restrictions in favor of market supply and demand, likened the opposition against free trade and globalization to the opposition against evolution via natural selection, opposed farm subsidies, argued that sweatshops are preferable to unemployment, dismissed the case for living wages, and argued against mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks for ethanol.

Paul Krugman has criticized US zoning laws and European labor market regulation.

Paul Krugman endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.

Paul Krugman has criticized the Republican Party leadership for what he sees as a strategic reliance on racial divisions.

Paul Krugman worked for Martin Feldstein when the latter was appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

Paul Krugman did not fit into the Washington political environment, and was not tempted to stay on.

Paul Krugman has praised the former British prime minister, whom he described as "more impressive than any US politician" after a three-hour conversation with him.

Paul Krugman asserted that Brown "defined the character of the worldwide financial rescue effort" and urged British voters not to support the opposition Conservative Party in the 2010 general election, arguing their Party Leader David Cameron "has had little to offer other than to raise the red flag of fiscal panic".

Paul Krugman has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump and his administration.

Paul Krugman's criticisms have included the president's climate change proposals, economic policy, the Republican tax plan and Trump's foreign policy initiatives.

Paul Krugman has often used his op-ed column in The New York Times to set out arguments against the president's policies.

On election night in 2016, Paul Krugman wrongly predicted in a New York Times op-ed that the markets would never recover under Trump and stated "first-pass answer is never" but retracted the call in the same publication three days later.

Paul Krugman stated that "Russia is even weaker than most people, myself included, seem to have realized", that the military performance of Russia "has been less effective than advertised" in a stalemate at the beginning of the invasion, and that Russia encountered serious logistical problems.

Paul Krugman observed that the country's total gross domestic product is only a bit more than half as large as those of countries such as Britain and France, despite Russia's landmass, total population and natural resource endowment.

In 1998 during the dot-com bubble, Paul Krugman wrote a commentary for Red Herring that urged skepticism of optimistic predictions for technology-driven progress.

Paul Krugman followed it with several pessimistic predictions of his own, including that "[b]y 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's" and that the number of jobs for IT specialists would decelerate and turn down.

Paul Krugman is a vocal critic of Bitcoin, arguing against its economic soundness since 2011.

Paul Krugman's first wife, Robin L Bergman, is a designer.

Paul Krugman is currently married to Robin Wells, an academic economist who received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Paul Krugman subsequently became a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a distinguished scholar at the Graduate Center's Luxembourg Income Study Center.

Paul Krugman reports that he is a distant relative of conservative journalist David Frum.