February 28: Paul Krugman

Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman was born in Albany, New York on this date in 1953. Krugman is a New York Times columnist who champions government regulation of corporate excess, progressive taxation, and Keynesian principles. He correctly predicted that the Obama stimulus package would be too small to turn around the American economy after the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, and he has urged that the bail-out of the country’s largest financial institutions be accompanied by strict regulation that would end high-profit, high-risk speculation that led to the derivatives boom and the collapse of the housing market. Krugman emerged as one of the foremost critics of wealth polarization and trickle-down economics in such books as The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990), The Great Unraveling (2003), and The Conscience of a Liberal (2007). He attributes his early interest in economics to Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation Trilogy, in which social scientists of the future strive to save the world through “psychohistory.” Krugman’s 2008 Nobel Prize was awarded in recognition of his work on international trade and the geographic concentration of wealth, as affected by economies of scale and consumer preference for product diversity. A 2011 survey of American economics professors ranked him as their favorite living economic thinker under the age of 60.

“The changing politics of race made it possible for a revived conservative movement, whose ultimate goal was to reverse the achievements of the New Deal, to win national elections – even though it supported policies that favored the interests of a narrow elite over those of middle- and lower-income Americans.” —Paul Krugman