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Paul Krugman (born February 28, 1953) is an American economist. He is probably best-known to the public as an outspoken and formidable critic of the economic policies of the administration of George W. Bush. Unlike many economic pundits, he is regarded as a respected economist by his peers. Krugman has written hundreds of papers and eighteen books — some of them academic, and some of them written for the layperson. His International Economics: Theory and Policy is a standard textbook on international economics. In 1991 he was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association.

Krugman was born and grew up on Long Island, and majored in economics as an undergraduate at Yale. He obtained a Ph.D. from MIT in 1977 and taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford University before joining the faculty of Princeton University, where he has been since 1996. From 1982 to 1983, he spent a year working at the Reagan White House as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers.

When Bill Clinton came into office in 1992, it was expected that Krugman would be given a leading post, but he was passed over for various reasons. However, this allowed him to turn to writing journalism for wider audiences, first for Fortune and Slate, later for The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, The Economist, Harper's, and Washington Monthly. In his own words, he became adept at "new kind of writing ... essays for non-economists that were clear, effective, and entertaining."

Krugman worked on an advisory board for Enron throughout most of 1999 before resigning to take a job as a columnist. This became a source of controversy when the story of the Enron scandal broke, with critics accusing him of having a conflict of interest and the job of having been a bribe to control media coverage, charges he vehemently denies. He also notes that he disclosed the past Enron relationship when he later wrote about the company .

Since January, 2000 he has contributed a twice-weekly column to the Opinion/Editorial page of the New York Times which has made him in the words of the Washington Monthly "the most important political columnist in America... he is almost alone in analyzing the most important story in politics in recent years — the seamless melding of corporate, class, and political party interests at which the Bush administration excels."

In September, 2003, Krugman published a collection of his columns under the title, The Great Unraveling. It was a scathing attack on the Bush's administration's economic and foreign policies. The book was an immediate bestseller.

Krugman's high profile has turned him into a target of heavy criticism, and sometimes even personal attacks, by his detractors, as well as praise from a growing body of fans.

In the 1990s Paul Krugman's focus was on what can be described as policy economics, which he attempted to explain to the general audience in such works as "Peddling Prosperity" and columns attacking what he described as "policy entrepreneurs" who were focused single mindedly on particular solutions which they proposed as solving every conceivable crisis.

Krugman was the main architect of the zero interest rate policy.

Bibliography

• Peddling Prosperity (ISBN 0393312925), 1995. A book for those seeking to understand the history of economic thought from the time of the first rumblings of revolt against Keynesianism to the present. Written for the economics layman. Somewhat dense, but worthwhile in the opinion of some.
• The Accidental Theorist (ISBN 0393318877), 1999. A collection of Krugman's articles for various publications regarding the economy.
• The Return of Depression Economics (ISBN 0393320367), 2000. In this work Krugman considers the long economic stagnation of Japan through the 1990s, the Asian financial crisis, and problems in Latin America, and concludes that the generally accepted idea among economists that depressions can be prevented is no longer true.
• The Great Unraveling (ISBN 0393058506), 2003. A book of his New York Times columns, many of them dealing with Bush economic policies, some dealing with the economy in general.

External links

• Paul Krugman's home page
• The Unofficial Paul Krugman website Most if not all articles ever written by Paul Krugman
• Washington Monthly profile
• The Accidental Theorist Online version of his book of essays

• Essayists
• Economists