Congratulations! His blog has been absolutely indispensible reading as I try and get my head around the economic crisis. He didn’t win the prize for blogging but I have the suspicion the prize was intended by the Swedish central bank as an endorsement of his views on the crisis.
Now I feel the need to play catch-up to understand the work (PDF) that actually earned him the prize!
The paper you linked to is rather late in the development of Krugman’s work, the Nobel committee primarily cited his works from 1979 through the early 1980s. Of course they don’t award prizes unless the work has withstood decades of evaluation.
The summary of Krugman’s theories released by the Nobel Foundation is rather good and accessible even to non-economists.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008/info.pdf
BTW, I remember a few years ago when Krugman started his NYTimes column, I recommended it to a friend of mine who was in school doing his MBA. I insisted his columns were essential reading for any MBA student. He gave me the strangest look, then rummaged in his backpack, pulled out a book entitled “Macroeconomics,” held it up and said, “THIS Krugman?!?” Ha.. I didn’t know until that Krugman’s book is the most widely used textbook in business schools. A whole generation of business and economics students are being raised on Krugman’s principles. His influence cannot be underestimated.
Lots of good links here:
http://www.metafilter.com/75616/The-Nobel-Prize-is-Shrill
Note the Google video that’s reposted to my blog as well as the documents from the Nobel org. itself which are very lucid.
Thanks for mentioning the time horizon of the award… I had been thinking it’s like the Oscars where they hand out an award only to work published in the past year or so. Shows what I know!
Yeah, Nobels are usually given out for decades-old work. I think historically speaking Krugman may even have gotten his a bit early in his career!
I must admit that I was getting fed up with Krugman’s increasingly irritating politics centered columns, particularly his shilling for Hillary during the primary elections, but now that the front page is in his territory he’s really showing his strengths as a columnist. Kristof is still my favorite though, but that may partly because I would actually want his job.
Actually, the “Nobel Prize” in Economics is not one of the prizes established by Alfred Nobel — it is funded by the Bank of Sweden. Still, Paul Krugman is a partisan hack, who tends to tailor his conclusions and policy prescriptions to his favored political outcomes. Donald Luskin has debunked Krugman’s NYT columns at length. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZjMDQ1OTc0NzBmZDJmNzI1NzczZTUzZTI2NmVlZjA=
I’m not sure if you can say that Nobels are awarded for decades-old work. Certainly, at 55, Krugman is relatively young for an economics prize winner. However, the category was only created in 1969 so there was an element in the early years of trying to catch people before they died because Nobels are not given posthumously. There appeared to be a gear shift in the nineties and Robert Merton was 53 while Myron Scholes was 56 when they shared the prize in 1997 for work which had only been around since 1973. Taleb, of course, has recently been berating the pair and arguing that the award should be revoked.
For those who are interested.An argument from Japan.
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/ikedanobuo/e/781e960ab853e3bad264344658000004
Edokko: His NYT columns do often have that flavor, but from what I’ve been told his genuine economics research is very different stuff indeed, and much of it is now standard textbook material among what is quite possibly the most right-leaning of all major academic disciplines. Of course I’ll probably never read any of that stuff because I just don’t have the time or interest to learn the math and stuff required.
And as for Luskin, the first thing I saw when I looked him up was that economist Brad DeLong has called him “the stupidest man alive”. Again, I have no comment but it is funny to see these guys sniping at each other in a nasty circle.
“quite possibly the most right-leaning of all major academic disciplines”
In Britain, the engineering and classics faculties tend to have a higher proportion of conservatives. Economics is split more evenly while the law faculty tends slightly more to the right. Modern languages usually leans furthest to the left.
Yeah, I would say that econ is pretty wishy-washy on the political spectrum in the US, too. Most econ professors I’m familiar with are social liberals and fiscal conservatives and therefore shun most contemporary definitions of either ideology. Law is a very left-leaning field, though, as is political science (which in the US is more or less an undergraduate equivalent for law, as law is almost never studied except in expensive lawyer mills law schools).
Perhaps I was hasty in my judgment regarding his academic work. The WSJ has a nice piece on Krugman today:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122394373157731081.html
Also, I agree with Joe’s opinion that law school faculties in the U.S. tend to be very left-wing (though there are a few exceptions at lower tier schools — George Mason and Chapman come to mind). In my experience, law profs tend to be the most egotistical and out-of-touch of any of the ivory tower denizens.