If you didn’t already know, then you should start to know who he is by now. Paul Krugman was announced this morning as the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics (or rather, ‘The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’).
It’s a very interesting and consequential choice that’ll have a lot of people talking, cheering, moaning, and mobilizing.
Krugman is an extremely high profile intellectual — maybe the most high profile commentator in the debate about the current economic crisis. He is very influential — and controversial — as a New York Times columnist and blogger (the first blogger to win a Nobel? asks Yglesias).
Like Daniel from Crooked Timber,
I can’t help thinking that this is actually Krugman’s reward for being the public voice of mainstream sensible Keynesianism for the last fifteen years, starting with the use of the liquidity trap to explain the Japanese slump, going through his prediction of the Asian crises and onward to today. In which case, well done the Nobel committee – Krugman’s NYT column has been more use to the public standing of economists than more or less anything published in the journals.
Tyler Cowan — who had the first and most informative postabout the announcement – provides a good summary, with lots of links, indicating Krugman’s qualifications for the prize, admitting:
I did not expect him to win until Bush left office, as I thought the Swedes wanted the resulting discussion to focus on Paul’s academic work rather than on issues of politics. So I am surprised by the timing but not by the choice.
“… until Bush left office” because Krugman built his public reputation by being one of the few, adament critics during the early years of Bush’s presidency, and the current timing of the prize ”signals to many that he’s being rewarded for his ideology, not his work, which is a shame,” as Will Wilkinson wrote an hour ago.
(My own introduction to Krugman was through a campaign on the National Post editorials page to vilify and discredit Krugman’s attacks on Bush — a “Paul Krugman Watch,” or something like that. It biased me against him for a long time, but the degeneration Bush’s leadership has made it hard to take the anti-Krugman sentiment without serious reservations.)
As I noticed odd bits of chatter on economics blogs in the past week or two — such as this postby Greg Mankiw, updating a ‘Nobel Prize Pool’ on Friday, in which Krugman did not appear in the top nine candidates — I fully expected the prize to go to someone I’d never heard of. And last night David Warsh included this remark in his Economic Principals column:
One thing that seems certain is that the award won’t have any very direct connection with the current crisis. The laureate or laureates will be thrust into the spotlight, whether blinking or shining, to accept their fame, explain what they did, perhaps to write an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, before retreating nearly as quickly to their studies to prepare for the string of congratulations, lectures and banquets.
The opposite has happened. Krugman normally posts a couple of widely read columns in the New York Times every week (here’s today’s), supplemented by (or is it the other way around?) several blog posts every day (for example, he posted five yesterday, on a Sunday). But today he so far has only posted one — announcing “a funny thing” happened to him this morning.
Too busy being congratulated I suppose (e.g. in four hours, that single, half-sentance blog post has generated 1818 comments). I wonder when he’ll start itching to get back into the fray. Surely he won’t want to be away from it for too long as the less friendly (to put it mildly) conservative commentators react to the announcement in coming hours and days.
Here’s a conservative reaction from a few minutes ago, by Jonah Goldberg at The Corner:
Man, I’m getting it from all sides. Liberal fans of Krugman insist that he’s a great economist so he must be a great columnist. Conservative foes of Krugman say he’s a buffoonish columnist who has said so many silly things, including about economics, the Nobel is a joke.
… and he goes on to quote one of his correspondents, a professional economist:
Krugman couldn’t be more different. He routinely fudges facts and, when called on it, refuses to admit error. He never presents both sides of an argument dispassionately and then uses reason and observed experience to discern the truth. He consistently demonizes anyone who doesn’t agree with him. His shrill, hysterical voice trivializes honest differences and invites counter-attack rather than reasoned rebuttal. Plus he’s not even well-informed on many issues that fall outside his academic specializations.
I know the Nobel committee doesn’t judge entirely on the basis of someone’s career, but Krugman’s Nobel should make them rethink this. He continues to use his NYTimes column in a way that diminishes the intellectual standards of his field. This does significant, long-run harm to what the Nobel Committee calls “Economic Sciences,” perhaps entirely offsetting the value of Krugman’s academic contributions.
To say the least, this is anything but a boring choice for the prize. Maybe this is why the Swedes chose a fairly low-profile (in America at least) Peace Prize winner this year, in Martti Ahtisaari…
Btw, where’s the response from the National Post (other than this story from the Bloomberg wire)?
[Update: Oops, I forgot it's a holiday here in Canada -- which is why I'm writing this instead of going to work...]
Another update: here’s an excellent dissenting opinion from Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek, which ends in a way I love to write myself (my emphasis added):
So if you love liberty and fear those who would engineer our well-being rather than let it emerge from our free choices, if you love liberty and fear those who would use good intentions as an excuse for plunder, don’t worry. We’ll have our day down the road. Keep reading and writing and thinking. And don’t yell. Above all, smile and hold firm to your principles. They will be remembered and valued when the pendulum swings the other way. It’s just a matter of time.
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