Paul Krugman is a
Princeton economics professor and columnist for
The New York Times. His field of focus is international and interregional
trade and finance. Recently, he has studied and written about economic crises.
Paul Krugman was born on 28 February, 1953 in the suburbs of New York City. He attended John F. Kennedy High School and Yale University. He enjoyed the Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov as a youth and says he was attracted to the field of psychohistory. He became a research assistant for his professor William Nordhaus in his junior year and decided on a career in economics.
Krugman graduated from Yale in 1974 and completed his graduate work at MIT, receiving his Ph.D. in 1977. He was a professor at Yale from 1977 to 1980, when he moved to MIT. He served on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors in 1982-83. He stayed at MIT until 1994 when he became a professor at Stanford for two years. He returned to MIT in 1996, but left to join the faculty at Princeton in July 2000.
Krugman is the author or co-author of more than 20 books. His work includes books written for the general public as well as the usual heavy economics texts. Krugman was awarded the John Bates Clark medal by the American Economic Association in 1991, an award given to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." He also received the Adam Smith Award in 1995, the Nikkei Prize (with M. Fujita and A. Venables) in 2001 and the Alonso Prize in 2002. He is the member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Institute of International Economics, the Econometric Society, the Group of Thirty, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Krugman contributed to Fortune and Slate magazines before taking his position as a columnist for the Times at the beginning of 2000. He also served on an Enron advisory board in 1999. This paid advisory position was used in an attack on his credibility by some politicians and pundits displeased with his columns, notably right-wing mud-slinger Andrew Sullivan. They alleged that the money he took from Enron was a journalistic conflict of interest, even though he was not a Times columnist at that time. This charge has been pretty much ignored by rational observers.
Selected Krugman books:
- The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science
- Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations
- The New Trade Agenda
- Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan
- International Economics: Theory and Policy (6th Edition)
- Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (3rd Edition)
- Currency Crises (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report.)
- The Return of Depression Economics