Reply #22: Krugman the economist [View All]

[lancemurdoch]

I've been reading Krugman's economics books for a while. In the 1990's he's written a few non-technical for the layman books which I've found interesting, he really explains well the course of economic thought from Milton Friedman through rational expectations to now in "Peddling Prosperity" (he also attacks not only supply siders, but Robert Reich and "strategic straders" as not being serious).

He knows his subject and he can express himself well. One thing he says is that as an economist, he has not shifted left or right, the ECONOMY has shifted in a direction that makes him change his views. In other words, he hasn't changed his mind about things, the economy has changed his mind about things. But he's concerned about more than our last recession and the current downturn as a result of that, he talks about Japan's malaise, the Asian financial crisis and so forth. The Guardian is correct when it says he was not so left in the early 1990's, he really wasn't, he was (maybe still is) 100% for free trade, unworried about unemployment in America as a result of jobs heading overseas, and praises sweatshops in Indonesia as being "better than nothing". Plus he is probably the most prominent liberal economist which is why his change in attitude is so interesting. I'm actually more interested in his changing ideas about the economic situation than his political ones, but of course, they're tied together.

I've been trying to ground myself in economics and decided to start with as far left as I could (Marx's Capital and his followers like Paul Sweezy and company) and move right after that to Keynesianism, then to monetarism. His books are so accessible though that I skipped ahead a bit. From far left to far right there is actually a lot of focus on the same issues, and some agreements on what plays out in a recession, although they disagree on why it happens and what can be done about it.