Paul Krugman wins economics Nobel prize

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/paul-krugman-wins-economics-nobel/?hp

by mhb • 18 years ago

56 43 18 years ago

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

I had the opportunity to hear Krugman speak in 2004 before the election. What I found surprising was how much he seemed to value his column. It certainly seemed like he thought it was much more important than his academic work.

j2d2• 18 years ago

He has a far larger audience via his column.

walterk• 18 years ago

I think it's extremely important to have academics in constant communication with the public. Keeps them grounded and their language plain, while the public can continue to engage with academics long after they've graduated.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

I can't find any fault in Krugman's academic work. I haven't read it, though it sounds fascinating. He is held in high regard in the academy, and I believe he is as talented as other people say he is.

His NY Times column, however, I feel fit to judge as shrill, unimaginative, vanilla leftism. I'm sure he understands all the criticisms that other economists would level at the policies he supports. The flaws are glaring. Now, it is perfectly honest to acknowledge the existence of those flaws and argue that the benefits of the policy outweigh the drawbacks. However, it is not honest to pretend that such criticisms do not exist.

I could read similar opinion pieces from any leftist without a PHD after his name. The point of reading someone so lettered is that his opinions should be well-argued and therefore interesting, even if you disagree with him. That is rarely the case with Krugman.

I have no doubt that his work in economics will be remembered 50 years from now, and his columns will be long forgot.

chaostheory2• 18 years ago

1) He didn't win a Nobel prize; it's actually the Sveriges Riksbank Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Economics#Relati...

2) As someone who advocated the flawed (and now admittedly failed) bailout scam, I'd have to question this

marvin• 18 years ago

We don't know whether the bailout plan has failed yet. Calling it a scam is certainly premature.

chaostheory2• 18 years ago

Not really. I call it a scam because it's not limited to just 700 billion. It's an unlimited raid on the treasury, and even the modified plan still doesn't have enough transparency. It gives the executive branch even more power.

To me this is just politics, since the prize was awarded by one of the central banks to someone strongly advocating their policies...

mynameishere• 18 years ago

If it works, it's still a scam.

zandorg2• 18 years ago

Also, there is no Maths Nobel. The closest thing is Economics, which is what John Nash won.

echair• 18 years ago

The closest thing is the Fields medal.

josefresco• 18 years ago

I get my financial advice from "midnight code monkeys".

smhinsey• 18 years ago

To be fair, his support of the bailout was basically along the lines of "this isn't great, but we have to do something."

jshen• 18 years ago

i have no idea what you're talking about. He's been highly critical of the plan from the outset. I've seen post after post criticizing it and only one or two which basically said, "this isn't perfect, but we need to act now, and this can get through the senate so it's the best we've got".

larryfreeman• 18 years ago

I have long admired Krugman's analysis. I haven't read his academic work on economics of scale but if it is of the same quality as his articles, the nobel prize is well deserved.

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

It's funny, I remember someone saying "If Paul Krugman hadn't started spewing about politics in the NY Times, he probably would've won the Nobel Prize." Looks like he won it anyway...

anamax• 18 years ago

Since some of the folks who decide the Nobel winners have been quoted that other decisions were made as a "kick in the leg" at the Bush administration, Krugman's political columns probably helped him.

DanielBMarkham8• 18 years ago

Left-leaning columnist and economist wins Nobel?

Doesn't seem very surprising to me given the history of the Nobel committee in the soft sciences and humanities. It will be interesting to see how history views Krugman's accomplishments. I know some of their laureates, like Arafat, didn't hold up so well.

ajross2• 18 years ago

Krugman is much, much more than a liberal columnist. He got the column because, unlike most pundits, he has a long track record of interesting work in his field, and, unlike most eggheads, a knack for and interest in explaining those issues to the public. If you're reading him only via links from redstate.com or whatever, you're very much missing the point.

And when did Yasir Arafat win the Nobel prize in Economics? You do realize that the selection committees are entirely different organizations, right? Must everything be a political swipe at conservatives? Isn't it possible that every once in a while one of those lib'ruls might actually produce something useful and be rewarded for it?

DanielBMarkham8• 18 years ago

Just waitin' on history to tell. You can return to your ranting now.

mingyeow• 18 years ago

i love paul krugman. completely logical , insightful, and comprehendable

michael_nielsen• 18 years ago

To those people wondering about the influence of politics on Krugman's prize:

(1) Krugman won the John Bates Clark Medal for economics in 1991. This is a Prize given every two years to an American Economist under 40. It's often considered harder to win than the economics Nobel, and is a significant predictor of who actually will win the Nobel. Note that this was largely before Krugman got involved in politics, and past winners include Milton Friedman. I doubt his politics helped him win this one.

(2) By most measures of citation impact, Krugman is one of the world's leading economists. E.g., http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.nbcites.html

Citations are, of course, an imperfect predictor of the significance of someone's work, this is just an additional data point.

I doubt his involvement in US politics had much impact on the prize.

aneesh• 18 years ago

His involvement in politics is largely limited to the past several years. His main contributions to economics, arguably, have come far before that.

He's the author of the foremost textbook on international trade (Krugman+Obstfield), and developed models of international trade that every economics major knows (or should, at least).

rcoder• 18 years ago

Anyone here who hasn't read Krugman's paper on the economics of interstellar trade owes it to themselves to do so:

http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

I've never laughed so hard that coffee went up my nose while reading an econ paper prior to coming across this one. (Okay, and maybe the first version of the Paulson bailout, but that was a very different sort of laughter.)

antiform• 18 years ago

This is GOLD.

"First Fundamental Theorem of Interstellar Trade: When trade takes place between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest costs on goods in transit should be calculated using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not by clocks in the frames of trading spacecraft."

and the final line for the kicker:

"Those of us working in this field are still a small band, but we know that the Force is with us."

alaskamiller• 18 years ago

I find it despicable that people are burning other people's karma for simply voicing their opinions on a freakin' message board.

aswanson2• 18 years ago

"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."

startingup• 18 years ago

There is a different strand of criticism of Krugman (and the neo-Keynesians in general) that is quite apart from his politics. At some level, this is a criticism of the modern economic profession itself, and its worship of mathematical models. This is conceptually analogous to but quite distinct from the Wall Street addiction to quantitative/stochastic modeling, which is behind much of the present mess. Krugman represents the pinnacle of that mathematical tradition. To be fair, Milton Friedman, ideologically the polar opposite of Krugman, has also faced similar criticism.

mhartl2• 18 years ago

If you've followed Krugman for long, you've seen this coming for quite a while. The possibility of his winning an economics Nobel have been rumored for years. The interesting thing to me is that, when reading his columns, I often get the sense that Krugman doesn't really believe in economics. He talks a good economics talk, but he hasn't internalized its lessons. He's like a brilliant Christian apologist who doesn't believe in Christ.

mhartl2• 18 years ago

s/have been/has been

Paul Krugman wins economics Nobel prize

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