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

American economist, professor, author, and pundit, born in 1953 to traveling circus folk in Zipperhead, New York. He grew up traveling throughout the Northeast with his family in Lucifer Bleake's Traveling Darkside Carnival and Hell Circus, one of a number of evil carnivals that roamed the nation during the early to mid-20th century, seeking souls to enslave and fantasy writers to inspire. While his family tempted and devoured farmhands and schoolteachers, young Paul learned all the trades of the circus -- tent set-up and take-down, trapeze acrobatics, clown wrangling, barking, human cannonballing, international economics and trade theory, and beating the geek when he escaped from his cage. Coincidentally, that geek eventually grew up to become fellow New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Upon fleeing from the circus just prior to the big top being sucked into Hell in 1970, Krugman earned a dual bachelor's degree in economics and adventure archaeology from Yale University in 1974 and a Ph.D. in economics and surfing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. While at MIT, he traveled to Portugal in 1976 with a group of other students to work at the Central Bank of Portugal. The nation had just been rocked by the Carnation Revolution, in which a bunch of violent florists dethroned the beloved King Earl IV and took over the country. Utilizing his studies in combat economics, Krugman defeated each of the florists in unarmed combat and was crowned Emperor Paul I. He ruled Portugal with an iron fist for several months until he announced his controversial "Let's Sacrifice Everyone in Portugal So I Can Get My Parents Released From Evil Circus Hell" plan. Realizing the political winds had changed, Krugman fled the nation and returned to his studies at MIT.

Krugman worked for Ronald Reagan's White House from 1982-83 as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, though he was quickly ejected after eating all the president's jelly beans and watering down his hair gel. From there, he taught at Yale, MIT, Berkeley, the Walla Walla School of Economics and Partyin' Down, and Clovis Community College before settling in at Princeton in 2000, where he teaches economics, international affairs, and kickpunching.

After writing a number of textbooks on economics, competitive racquetball, and the Monkees, Krugman began writing economics books for more general audiences, beginning with "The Age of Diminished Expectations" in 1990, followed by "The Great Unraviolioing," "The Conscience of a Circus Boy," "Pat Paul Krugman's Beard," and many more. His economics books were well-received enough to get him a gig writing columns for the New York Times. Actually, the folks running the NYT aren't all that smart, so Krugman got his job by giving the managing editor a note that read "THIS GUY IZ RITING 1 OV OUR COLLUMS NOW, PAY HIM SOME MUNNEY, SIGNED UR PUBLISHER (UR BOSS, DUMMY)" -- never let it be said that Paul Krugman doesn't know how to make his own opportunities.

In 2008, Krugman received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science, which is sometimes called the Nobel Prize in Economics. He celebrated the award by catching a plane to Cyprus to gloat about the win to Christopher A. Pissarides, a professor of labor economics and macroeconomics. This led to an awkward situation just two years later when Pissarides received the Riksbank Prize himself. During the last meeting of Krugman and Pissarides, a four-block area of Washington, D.C. was destroyed in their battle, and Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner suffered injuries that required him to undergo an emergency coccyx transplant.

Today, Krugman spends much of his time writing columns and blog posts for the NYTimes, appearing as a pundit on news programs, and trying to resurrect the evil carnival where he grew up. He also enjoys prank-calling Fox News pundit Charles Krauthammer ("Is this Rumplestiltskin?"  "A WITCH TOLD YOU THAT! A WITCH TOLD YOU THAT!") and going across the hall to fellow NYT columnist David Brooks' office and whuppin' nine shades of shit out of him every time Brooks writes something stupid in his column.

Research: Personal interviews with Krugman, Pissarides, Brooks, and Lucifer Bleake

 

LieQuest 2013

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