Hailed as the Emile Zola of our time, he has burst from academic obscurity to become Bush's greatest critic and a hero of the left by. Paul Krugman profiled by Janet Bush
It's the kind of T-shirt you would expect to see advertised in the New Statesman: a grainy, black-and-white portrait of a Che Guevara lookalike, absent the beret, emblazoned with the words "Let The Truth Be Told - Paul Krugman's Army". This unlikely revolutionary icon is professor of economics at Princeton University. Tipped by some of his peers to win the Nobel Prize for his work on economic geography and international trade, Krugman has become an agitprop hero.
He is now, largely through his columns in the New York Times, the best-known political commentator in America. His journey from academia to celebrity has been singular. In an age when few economists occasion much comment at all, it is hard to think of any who have ever registered on the public's radar screen in such a way other than John Maynard Keynes, J K Galbraith and, perhaps, Milton Friedman and Lester Thurow. Apart from Michael Moore (with whom he is often bracketed), Krugman is the Bush regime's most consistent and high-profile critic, idolised by Democrats. He is all the more despised by Republicans because his analysis has largely been right: on Bush's tax cuts for the rich, on the budget deficit, on the assault on social security, on the skewing of policy in favour of oil companies tied to the administration, and on the failure to find WMDs in Iraq.
Krugman has spawned a virtual industry aimed at discrediting him. Dedicated websites pour ordure on him; hate mail, some of it calling him "Jew-boy", is routine. Some on the left, such as James Carville, the former Clinton political adviser, suggest that Krugman would be even more effective if he moderated his tone. The columnist Alexander Cockburn gently mocks that he "has become the Democrats' Clark Kent. A couple of times each week he bursts on to the New York Times op-ed in his blue jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and whacks the bad guys." Others, however, hail him as "an Emile Zola for our time"; reading Krugman, one fan enthused, is "like drinking from a cool pond in 120-degree weather".
Krugman has never been one for the gentle obscurity of the campus; he has had an enduring interest in relating economics to real life. Born in 1953 and brought up on Long Island, his ambition was to become like the "psychohistorians" in Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories - a futuristic social scientist who could predict the course of human history. Economics became his tool. "Coming up with a good idea, with an insight into the way the world works that is really new and that you really believe in, is a deeply satisfying experience," he writes. "The only thing that is even more satisfying is when one idea leads on to another, when you find yourself making a whole series of related discoveries. When that happens, never mind if you are a shy and mild-mannered professor: you feel like some archetypal hero on a mythic quest."
Krugman studied at Yale and MIT, subsequently teaching at both as well as at Stanford and then, from 2000, at Princeton. In between, he did a one-year stint at the White House as a member of Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. There, he became cynical about those he subsequently dubbed "policy entrepreneurs" - activists and journalists with no obvious academic credentials, but enormous influence in Washington.
On his return to academia, he published his book The Age of Diminished Expectations, a primer on basic economic principles as they applied to current events. Krugman describes his four principles of research as "listen to the Gentiles, question the question, dare to be silly and simplify, simplify". Listening to the Gentiles, he explains, means paying "attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language". In 1991, his status as a rising young star was confirmed when he won the John Bates Clark Medal.
He seemed a shoo-in for a top job in economics at the Clinton White House. His work on income inequality had featured in the 1992 Clinton campaign and he had defended Clinton's economic plan in the New York Times that autumn. But the call never came. Former Clinton officials say he was passed over because he was "too volatile". Never one to mince his words, he attended an economic summit at Little Rock and then, on the Larry King Live talk show, declared the meeting "useless". He dismissed two of Clinton's top economic experts as "pop internationalists" who "repeat silly cliches but imagine themselves to be sophisticated".
Now Krugman himself has become the most prolific policy entrepreneur and pop internationalist of them all. Having written at a furious rate for magazines, both popular and academic, he started a regular column in the New York Times in 1999. The paper's syndication service, with 650 other papers as subscribers, ensures an exposure far beyond the Big Apple. Even so, the suspicion, as one hack put it, was that the Times "wanted someone to be boring in a genteel, scholarly way twice a week on its op-ed page". And indeed Krugman's early articles covered routine business and economics fodder such as Bill Gates and the stock market plunge. Then, as one commentator put it, George Bush Jr happened and you saw "disdain pass through frustration into rage".
After 11 September 2001, Bush got a soft ride from most mainstream commentators, who feared being taken to task for lack of patriotism. Krugman (with the luxury, as he has acknowledged, of independent means from his academic post) attacked the Bush White House only ten weeks after 11 September for wrapping itself in the flag. He later wrote: "Every administration contains its share of cynical political operators . . . But this administration seems to have nothing but cynical political operators, who use national tragedy for political gain . . ."
Be afraid, be very afraid, Krugman tells his adoring liberal readers week in, week out. He feels "creeping dread", he writes. "I think we were all living in a fool's paradise in the late 1990s. There probably wasn't as much energy in my criticism of the right. I was wrong, obviously. If I'd understood where politics would be now, it would have been quite different . . . We can have arguments about trade policy later. Now I'm frightened." At the start of his latest book, The Great Unravelling: losing our way in the new century, Krugman describes the Bush administration as a "revolutionary power" in the sense used in Henry Kissinger's reflections on the French revolution in his 1954 doctoral dissertation (which, Krugman recalls, sent chills down his spine): a power which does not accept the legitimacy of the current political system and which will stop at nothing to dismantle the America of the New Deal.
Where does this leave Krugman the economist? Most fellow practitioners admire the moral courage of his politicising; but they ask if his economics has suffered. "Clearly, the bloke has gone completely bonkers," said one British economist. "He is no longer working as a serious economist." Before his reinvention, Krugman was celebrated for his work in two major areas - in itself a remarkable achievement in a discipline that tends to be highly specialised. He explained how inherent natural resources are less important than concentrations of population and economic activity. Silicon Valley, for example, developed because a localised network of talent interacted, created substantial economic returns, attracted others and thus made the returns grow exponentially. Krugman also pioneered what came to be called "new trade theory", which holds that an increasing proportion of trade can be explained by technological innovation rather than countries' comparative advantages in, for example, natural resources.
Although some argue that Krugman's work is essentially a formalisation of well-established ideas - and he himself has put his success down to style and his ability to put theory into "nice models" - the views of Krugman the economist are generally admiring. One eminent British economics commentator said of him: "He is very able indeed and appropriately arrogant; a natural rabbi who delights above all in using economics to demonstrate that everyone (or at least all the non-economists) have reached the exact opposite of the right conclusion."
Some see Krugman as Keynes's heir, rehabilitating and popularising his great predecessor. It is an article of faith for him that there is no recession that cannot be cured by an injection of public spending. Others see him as essentially a neo-classicist with soft edges, a "new Keynesian" who has bought free markets but wants a touch of government intervention to keep things stable - the Ed Balls/Gordon Brown school. He is not, to the disappointment of the radical left, anti-globalisation. In one column, he attacked protesters against the Free Trade Area of the Americas; in another, he defended the use of child labour in the developing world, accusing critics of good intentions but also of "doing their best to make the poor even poorer". As for Marx, Krugman is dismissive, saying: "By my reckoning, Karl Marx made about as much contribution to economics as Zeppo Marx made to comedy."
What will happen to Krugman if Bush fails to win a second term? Will the motive force of his journalism weaken and will serious economics beckon him back out of the limelight? One doubts it. "The interesting thing about Krugman," says Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect, "is that he was a mainstream neoclassical economist who was moderately liberal as a citizen but tended to look at politics as an illegitimate distortion of the perfection of the market economy. He viewed the left and the right as symmetrical evils. Krugman has now discovered power." For a romantic who sees his life's work as a heroic quest, that will be hard to leave behind.
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