This morning, the 2008 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Princeton economist Paul Krugman "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity." The award was bestowed for his academic work — which many have suggested was Nobel-worthy for some time — not his political commentary, though the latter may have played a role. "Krugman is not only a scientist but also an opinion maker," commented one member of the prize committee. Early NYT coverage is here.
UPDATE: I just reread the post and want to make clear that I believe Krugman's Nobel is well-deserved. He is clearly among the most important economists of his generation. My suggestion that his political commentary may have been a factor was not meant to disparage his accomplishment. It was a reaction to the quote in wire story cited above. That said, I will confess some dread at the prospect of hearing "according to Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman . . . " every time someone quotes one of his NYT columns on political issues.
UPDATE: Tyler Cowen discusses the award and Krugman's work here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Henderson on Krugman's Nobel:
- Krugman Wins Nobel Prize:
Tell us, Observer, how familiar are you with Krugman's scholarly work? What do you consider its flaws?
Is this because his theories have been so widely accepted that they've become conventional wisdom, or because the description of his work has been dumbed down so that people like me can have some idea what it is that Krugman worked on?
Further more who submitted it or who requested it.
It is the two pager simplistically describing the Henry Ford 1911 production calculations for the Model T - is the basis for the award - then you can make the judgement for yourself
By the way he is at MIT:
And this is the summary of his new book - this is why he received the award - its interesting - economics is usually not studied in Communist societies....
I don't like Krugman's politics or his NYTimes columns, and I think that the Nobel Peace Prize has become a joke, but I have no knowledge of Krugman's academic work and no reason to doubt Prof. Adler's statement that "Krugman's Nobel is well-deserved. He is clearly among the most important economists of his generation."
The Conscience of a Liberal is not why Krugman received the award. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please provide it.
@paul lukasiak: [Krugman's] accomplishments seemed intuitively obvious. Is this because his theories have been so widely accepted that they've become conventional wisdom, or because the description of his work has been dumbed down so that people like me can have some idea what it is that Krugman worked on?
Some of both, I think, although probably some of it relates to the fact that concepts that may make intuitive sense are hard to model formally.
Given the frequency of the factual errors and flawed logic in his political commentary, I have my doubts that he had maintained sufficient intellectual and rigous standards necessary to merit a nobel prize in his prior life.
It was mentioned in the Nobel committee press release and it the deciding factor was the Chairman Englund (who BTW actually has the vote - the committee advises only)
Mentioned buried in the Swiss News agency this Quote from Englund wqhen asked why they took a political stance:
This was politics - or is quoting the man who actually awarded the award cutting and pasting too much?
OK, but I gotta ask: given the disparity of views - amounting, sometimes, to flat contradiction - among economists, what are the odds that even the 'most important' of them are right?
Ask Yassar
Take that, Krugman! And I can't wait to see the look on his face when he realises that the cash prize is made up of Monopoly money...
I'm very happy to have him around. Think about it: The world's most famous left-wing economist:
1. Blames European unemployment on labor market regulations that hold wages above the market-clearing level. (The Accidental Theorist, Part 1)
2. Publicly and articulately advocates free trade without hemming or hawing. (Pop Internationalism)
3. Identifies anti-globalization activists as the enemies of the world's poor. (The Accidental Theorist, Part 3)
4. Titles an essay "In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Are Better than No Jobs at All" (The Accidental Theorist, Part 3)
don't be so partisan, the work underlying the Nobel is good free market economics
BCN
Expositor means "one who explains." Someone's ability to explain things clearly would be apparent from textbooks and columns written for a lay audience.
The problem with your "this was politics" claim isn't that you cut/pasted, it's that you mischaracterized the statement you copied. Krugman's expository accomplishments are not the same as his research accomplishments, and on top of that, it's entirely possible to recognize clear communication whether or not you agree with it.
Nice discussion of his work at Marginal Revolution.
Whereas his heroes labor unions who built America are not
Also note 95% of the draconian justification paper from the NOT REALLY THE NOBLE COMMITTEE quotes other economists and actually criticizes Krugmans work a simple and single factor
E=mc2 its not
And then Krugman finally mentions and admits corporations which he renames as "the firm"
2008 Committee Paper
As for Krugman, and not his profession: I'm just going to have to assume that he's deserving, since I have no way to evaluate his work. But the thing that bothered me about NYT's decision to give him a column was that he could leverage his prestige in his academic field to give himself credibility on issues about which he can't claim any expertise.
This sort of thing happens in academia, though not often at Krugman's level of visibility. (Think of Victor Davis Hanson on the right, although he generally will stick to military topics.) Those in academia know, however, how narrow academic specialties have become. We can't speak with authority on issues outside of our purview.
The fact that Krugman is not bothered by this bothers me.
does anyone else suspect that this point has never been made by Eric with regard to Milton Friedman?
But anyway, it's not a "real" Nobel, so there. (Relax, conservatives, take a deep breath, it'll all be OK. And therut, I'll bet he pays his taxes like everybody else.)
Ummm they (the not really the Nobel Committee) clearly felt the need to mention his many political columns - why? and actually - if you were a true student of his work, the last decade has been purely marxist political economic studies criticizing capitalism from A to Z as causing all the misery in the world.
So I respectfully disagree based upon the preponderance of evidence and the actual statement of the Man who gave Krugman the Award
His last words in the short interview to justify to the entire world his decision were:
This may be how a lot of "public intellectuals" get started. They're extremely credible in an academic field, but find that angry rants about politics sell more books.
Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics is very highly regarded...
One could, of course, try to both have one's cake and eat it, though that's not sound economic (or rational) policy. But it seems that that is indeed what most people do.
Today's financial meltdown provides the Q.E.D.
EricPWJohnson wrote:Krugman was Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT until 1999 or 2000, but he has been at Princeton since then.
Milton Friedmans work completely and totally debunks all of Krugmans - the committee noted Friedmans achievements in advising world leaders and seeing the positive results his theories had when actually used - Krugman was awarded a prize for calling someone stupid since late 2000.
Friedman may also win a real Nobel prize in the future in Mathematics - something that Krugman is lacking sorely in his 1911 model T 10 pager with static labor, demand and other - almost impossible to forecast in the real world -variables.
This would be a neat trick, since there isn't even a fake Nobel prize for Mathematics. (Cue the apocryphal stories about the reason for that in 1..2..)
er...waiting for Orin to tell you to get back on the meds...
You beat me to it. I'd say that's a fairly safe assumption.
yours/
peter.
~p
What extraordinary irony.
Ya, I hate it when really smart people reach different conclusions than me.
He sought to justify nationalized health care at a debate sponsored by NPR; in the audience were a number of Canadians. In an attempt to make a point, he asked the Canadians to identify themselves by raising their hands. He then asked how many of them thought they had terrible health care. All of those people again raised their hands. Krugman then stated, "Bad move on my part," before launching blindly back into his talking points.
I find this telling because he felt that exposure to facts from people damaged by nationalized health care was a "bad move." Considering exposure to facts a "bad move" is antithetical to scholarly, yet some people allege him to be a scholar.
Further, instead of addressing their concerns, or reconsidering his position in the light of facts, he simply ignored them in favor of resuming his memorized presentation, facts be damned. In short, he has a position -- a theory -- that facts cannot be allowed to affect.
Given that, he's more of an academic than a scholar.
Gary Becker won it, and plenty of other Chicago school economists (such as Friedman) have as well.
Krugman is a great economist, especially on trade issues. (You will notice, by the way, that for all his criticism of Republican economic positions, he very rarely goes after conservatives on trade (and when he does, it's usually because of a departure from free-trade orthodoxy).)
It's also clear that the Nobel committee liked his politics. So what?
I would also note something else. While conservatives have many valid points about economics, a lot of conservative POLITICAL rhetoric about economics (that markets always work, that regulation is always more costly than deregulation, that tax cuts raise revenue, and, on the nuttier fringe, that Austrian school economics was right about monetary policy) is dead wrong.
If you want to be purists about Krugman's political commentary, it seems to me that conservatives need to take the log out of their own eye first.
He should have asked the follow up question "How many of you would like to trade your health care system for the American one?" I doubt he'd see any hands go up at that point.
Sometime I even wonder why God created a world in which conflicting positions can even exist . . .
Indeed, but he intends such conflicts to test my faith in my certitude, which only increases it.
"Firm" is standard econ lingo, perhaps because not all firms are corporations.
See, for example, "The Nature of the Firm", written by Ronald Coase in 1937.
Next up on Fox News: "Paul Krugman pals around with terrorists."
For those who are interested in learning more about Krugman's contributions to economic theory, which are beyond doubt to anyone who as any knowledge of international econ at all, Marginal Revolution delivers (as always):
MR 1
MR 2
This is a good question. Krugman is obviously a smart guy, and I'm willing to give the Nobel committee the benefit of the doubt that he's worthy. However, this award makes me uneasy, and not only because Krugman had no self-esteem issues even before receiving it. It's hard to know whether to trust the secular work of a highly ideological polemicist who registers Krugmanian levels of disdain or even hatred toward people who disagree with him. Was he like this back when he was thinking for a living? If so, can those of us who disagree with his politics trust him to have played it straight?
I'd also be suspicious of a similarly situated conservative recipient. But Milton Friedman, to take an example raised in this thread, was either less religious (for want of a better word) about his conservatism than Krugman is about his liberalism, or simply better disciplined.
Thanks for raising the level of the discourse.
Please. If you're going to try to ask VC commenters (and two posters I can think of) to take intellectually honest and consistent positions, the whole site is going to implode.
He posted links that did just that. What's on Fox News now?
Witness: "my dog knows more about economics than Krugman."
I thought this was a site populated by serious thinkers on the law and economics. It this instead a site for folks who scorn ideas?
I would say that a good economist also has attention for the limitations of his/her field. Economics is not the answer to all questions, so the proper way to use it is to analyse a problem using economic tools, and then take that answer into account in making a policy decision. For example, economics is deliberately "wertfrei", it tries to stay away from premises that are based on values. That's why we use the (fairly weak) Pareto principle. Everyone would agree that a Pareto suboptimal situation is not desireable. Choosing between different Pareto optima, however, requires moral judgement, so that is something economists don't do.
Similarly, it could be a good thing to sacrifice some efficiency for a degree of social justice. Whether it is, though, is a moral judgement that economics can't impeach.
He does take a usual dig at the W. administration saying the FEMAficiation of government under W. (i.e. pushing out competent people in favor of ideological hacks) meant that there was no one at Treasury to tell Paulson his original idea was dumb.
I think this is sort of typical Krugman. Makes some interesting points and then throws a political barb.
Anyway, can't we all agree that it's great an American has won. USA ... USA ... USA
No, but there is the Fields Medal. Friedman couldn't (now) win that either.
No relation, sad to say.
And another committee member just has been quoted as saying the award was purely political
But what do I know.....
Nunzio
Actually the original plan by Bush was to own the debt which the government used to anyway until LBJ in efforts to pay for the great society cut Fannie and Freddie off the govt books
Krugman is not only a scientist but also an opinion maker," economics prize committee member Tore Ellingsen said.
I don't want to accuse you of rank dishonesty, so I will just say that you need to read the quote again. It clearly says that Krugman is notable both for his economics and his op-ed commentary. And yet you derive from this that the award was "purely" political. How can you possibly reach THAT conclusion?
Isn't the obvious conclusion from the quotation you cite that the award was not "purely" political but rather was motivated by both Krugman's economic accomplishments and his politics?
For someone like Krugman to profess economies of scale and yet decry capitalism (see Martinned above) this flies in the face of his research which its just an unproven theory -not backed up even by himself anymore. (and he won?)
The Stock Market during Bush has reached heights never before achieved, something Krugman decried at that time was even more dangerous than banking destabilization which Krugman supported in the Clinton years.
The fact that the stock market could fall so far and we could infuse - overnight a trillion dollars without deflation and tanks in the streets is an obvious answer in of its self.
And as we are seeing perhaps 500, 1000, 1500 being possibly gained back in the next week the only people who lost were those who panicked in the very short term.
Two people have mentioned his political commentary as a FACTOR - who were on the committee
Anvil - meet head
A FACTOR is a REASON
They had since 1979 to award him the prize......
EricPWJohnson:After reading a sentence like this, it comes as no surprise that you don't know what "but also" means.
I guess this should clear up any questions you may have
LBJ tried to lighten the government spending numbers by keeping the debt potential if a housing crisis emerged off the books
So what is the opposite of capitalism
I apreciate your defending Krugman - but Krugman's been paid good coin to undermine the United States by his never ending stream of vitrolic and unfounded columns and yet accept an award for a paper espouting conservative priciples will create a perfect marketplace and perfect free trade?
See where I'm coming from?
That said, I think he is often wrong, but it takes more than economics alone to explain why.
Incidentally, do you mind if I have a particular problem with your statement that Krugman somehow "undermine[s] the United States" by writing about his POV in the newspaper? Personally, I'd like to think that freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, and that speech doesn't usually "undermine" countries.
I'm no great fan of Krugman's politics or columns, but if you actually read them you would see that they retain a good bit of his free trade orientation. And all that's irrelevant to the award, which is based on his earlier research.
Eric:
I agreed it was a factor. But that's not what you said. You said the action was "purely political", i.e., that the ONLY reason they gave it to him was politics. And the quotes you pulled up just indicated that there were dual reasons, i.e., that it was about his political work AND his economics work.
Not if you know what you are saying is wrong.
Krugman was propagandizing which is not free speech,
Perfect example
He praised England for doing the same thing America has done but he condemmed Bush as a far reaching radical (funny a demorat congress introduced the legislation)
So is Krugman a liar, a cheap transparent partisan hack - or a free thinke?
Then he gets an award for a paper he has for the better part of a decade denounced fundamentally in his numerous columns. Go read them - they are disgusting for an academic who has published papers in the opposite direction.
It would be like Enstein stating - hey - It was alll just a joke E=mc2
So did Krugman believe in capitalism in 1979 and socialism in 2009?
Why did he not withdraw the paper?
I have been impressed by all the posters who are saying that the intellectual quality of the blog has gone downhill. They are wrong!
So just shut up, you sweatbeetle-dickweeds.
1979 to 2000 publishes these supposedly groundbreaking papers that rethink our universe - not a pip from the Good Swedes
2001-2008 NYT Columnist becomes famous for Bush is stupid, Republicans are BAD, America is EVIL ad naseum
refutes 1979 conservative paper
Wins prize
I'm done good night its evening over here
It is rare for any Nobel committee to award any Nobel Prize to someone for something they had done in the immediate past.
Again, no doubt there's politics in the timing. But that's a far cry from "purely political". Your statement implied that there was no non-political justification for the award at all, and that's clearly not true.
Nobel Prizes usually recognize work that was done many years earlier. The timing of Krugman's award is thus par for the course. It does not even suggest, let alone prove, that the award was based upon his more recent writings.
Economics is about efficiency, about cost/benefit tradeoffs, about what the least costly way is to achieve a certain goal. Free markets and free trade are the best way to achieve a maximum of welfare for a maximum number of people, but it does come at a cost. Discussing whether those costs are worth it is an appropriate subject matter for newspaper opinion pages and blogs, not economic journals.
What's more, the point of much of Krugman's work isn't even free trade, but rather quite simply explaining trade flows. I.e. a positive model, not a normative one. Why does America export computers to Japan, and imports them from Japan at the same time? (I'm not sure if that is true, but it's just an example of intra-industry trade.) He wasn't defending any system.
Finally, just so we're clear, I'm not defending anything in particular Paul Krugman has written. It is quite likely that he has on occasion been wrong, in the sense of writing something objectively incorrect. What's more, it is also quite likely that I would disagree with many of his political views, even when they are not objectively incorrect. The point is to distinguish between his work as an economist and the political views he defends in the NYT.
Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. And however groundbreaking Krugman's work was, it pales in comparison to the invention that made modern computers possible.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that the Nobel Committee (and yes, I know it's a different committee entirely for Economics) tends not to give prizes for something that happened only a short time ago. Hell, even Einstein had to wait 16 years.
Ah, the person who moderates the comments on Krugman's blog doesn't have time to keep up with all of them, except now he does.
Seriously, though, Krugman is the conservative's best friend. You can point out how Nobel Laureate and unapologetic liberal Paul Krugamn advocates free trade, supports sweatshops, and blames European unemployment on their labor market regulations.
Econlog has more.
We're on the same side here, but in point of fact, I can think of a few "recent activity" Nobels, like the peace prizes to Al Gore and Jody Williams. It does happen.
The scientific ones are not.
Different prize, different standard.
Jimmy Carter's peace prize was for a long period of activities.
It just depends-- sometimes the activities are more recent than others.
as Becker a real Nobel laureate said..
As Buchannan a real Nobel Laurearte said...
As Coase...
As Lucas...
They hardly agree in anythinhg with Krugman and are Freedom champions
It must be depressing to be Paul Krugman. No matter how well the economy performs, Krugman’s bitter vendetta against the Bush administration requires him to hunt for the black lining in a sky full of silvery clouds. With the economy now booming, what can Krugman possibly have to complain about? In today’s column, titled That Hissing Sound, Krugman says there is a housing bubble, and it’s about to burst…
There are, of course, obvious differences between houses and stocks. Most people own only one house at a time, and transaction costs make it impractical to buy and sell houses the way you buy and sell stocks. Krugman thinks the fact that James Glassman doesn’t buy the bubble theory is evidence in its favor, but if you read Glassman’s article on the subject, you’ll see that he actually makes some of the same points that Krugman does. But he argues, persuasively in my view, that there is little reason to fear a catastrophic collapse in home prices.
Krugman will have to come up with something much better, I think, to cause many others to share his pessimism.
John Hinderaker, in peak form.
It used to be that people like this were put in straightjackets,heavily medicated and escorted to padded rooms.
Today, they have their own political party.
But if circumstances were different, I suspect that left-wingers rather than right-wingers would be complaining. Consider: If William Shockley were alive today and had just received the Nobel award, would the people who are snarking at conservatives in this thread be applauding his work in the physics of semiconductors? Or would they take his later theories in eugenics as evidence that he was a Bad Person and didn't deserve a prize for any of his work?
(BTW, I recall a cover story in the UCLA alumni magazine, circa 1975, that argued exactly that.)
This is similar to Chomsky's work with linguistics vs his foreign policy diatribes.
That was the analogy that came to my mind as well. Though Krugman is not as "out there" on policy as is Noam. Chomsky's popular, political books are a disaster when it comes to scholarship. He just doesn't do his homework. I recall Yale's Paul Kennedy getting asked about Chomsky a couple times during a talk he gave in Chicago (early '90s?). He finally got fed up and made this point, with examples.
Yet Chomsky is one of the most accomplished scientific linguists of his generation, and his work on syntax has been hugely influential. Too bad about the other stuff, because I think it makes (some) people shut him out when it comes to his work in the field where he actually does good work.
In any event, watch Da Ali G. Show interview with Chomsky on Youtube. How Cohen gets people to take Ali G. seriously is beyond me.
It used to be that people like this were put in straightjackets, heavily medicated and escorted to padded rooms.
Today, they have their own political party.
But you know what? Neither John Hinderaker nor Barney Frank has won a Nobel prize. Shall we stick to the topic?
The Prize has done better when it has honored international organizations like the International Committee for the Red Cross (twice, 1917 and again 1944; the founder of the ICRC, Jean Henry Dunant won the first prize in 1901); UNICEF (1965); the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (1954); and to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) - or Doctors Without Borders (1999).
Prominent Americans who have won while in government are Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and George C. Marshall (1953). Other good selections have been Andrei Sakharov (1975); Lech Walesa (1983);and to the 14th Dalai Lama in Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso (1989), the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
A good summary of the first hundred years of the Nobel Peace Prize is here. While in the recent past the Prize Committee has gone off its rails, the current award, it seems like the Committee is getting back to its roots.
Great. Now I have to get the snot off my display.
Probably true in 2003, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had only a small exposure to subprime and Alt-A loans. They didn't start buying junk MBS in bulk till 2006. Check out this article from 2007 in the Washington Post
Isn't it the case that Fannie and Freddie took on the vast majority of the bad loans after this date?
I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying he should have said "corporations" because he could only have been talking about large companies?
There's nothing that says large companies have to be corporations. Some of the biggest companies in the world are partnerships.
Why not Larry Summers, the youngest person to win tenure at Harvard and nephew of two Nobel Laureate economists (Samuelson and Arrow)?
Finally, a question that might be more pertinent to Nobel prizes for physical and biologic sciences - why are the prizes sometimes awarded so many years after the work was done and its value appreciated? Physics prizes, for example, given three or four decades later, when some who deserved to be so honored have died and are no longer eligible, since the prizes are never awarded posthumously?
Scientists don't immediately accept the new and radical as correct. They fight over it for a couple decades, and eventually, the theory is proved or disproved by further evidence and argument.
For example, Einstein's theories weren't generally accepted for many years.
Tsung-Dao Lee and C. N. Yang's discover of the law of parity violation in weak nuclear reactions. Discovered in 1957, Nobel Prize the same year.
Johannes Georg Bednorz and Karl Alexander Müller for their discovery of high-temperature superconductors, announced 1986, Nobel Prize 1987.
Another advantage was that both of these discoveries were totally unexpected.
Many of the people who discovered elementary particles, such as the positron, neutron and anti-proton, got their Nobel Prizes just three or four years later.
Sheesh. I really need to put a <sarcasm> tag in the text for some people.
My comment, other than the quote, was a word-for-word recap of what "sputnik" had written, criticizing those Powerline guys that Tony Tutins seems to despise. But sputnik's quote from John Hinderaker at Powerline was from 2005 ... a year that, last time I checked, occurred before the year 2006, when (as you say) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started buying junk MBS in bulk. </sarcasm>
So yeah, maybe Frank's quote wasn't quite as stupid as it now seems. But neither was Hinderaker's quote ... the one about which sputnik remarked, "It used to be that people like this were put in straightjackets, heavily medicated and escorted to padded rooms."
Can we go back to the Nobel prizes now?
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