Paul Krugman
Economist, Nobel Prize in Economics 2008 for trade theory
Born 1953
Photo: Prolineserver (talk) · GFDL 1.2
«Economics is not a morality play.»
Paul Krugman explained why similar countries trade so much with each other, showing that consumers wanting variety and factories getting cheaper at scale matter more than differences in climate or resources. He has written a New York Times column since 1999.
Key achievements
- Nobel Prize in Economics, 2008, for trade and economic geography
- Professor of economics at Princeton, 2000–2015
Universities
New Haven, Connecticut
Took a bachelor's degree in economics in 1974.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Took his PhD in 1977 and later taught there for more than a decade.
Princeton, New Jersey
Professor of economics and international affairs from 2000 to 2015.
Facts
- He has said he became an economist after reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, whose fictional science of psychohistory predicted the behaviour of whole societies.
- His paper on trade and geography was rejected by a journal before becoming one of the most cited in the field.
- He predicted the Asian financial crisis of 1997 in an article that argued the region's growth came from piling up inputs rather than getting more efficient.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.