# Paul Krugman **Paul Krugman** (b. February 28, 1953) is the American economist who won the 2008 Nobel for new trade theory and economic geography and then spent a quarter-century as the most-read liberal economist in the country — *New York Times* columnist from 2000 to December 2024, and since then a daily Substack newsletter with several hundred thousand readers. He is the right's favorite economist foil and, in this vault, the liberal-Keynesian pole against which the [[Supply-Side Economics]], [[Monetarism]] and [[Classical Economics]] pages are read. Four of his Quotes-folder entries and seven Economics pages link here; the [[Great Divergence]] page uses his framing of the post-1970s inequality turn. ## The economist MIT faculty from 1979, Princeton 2000–2015, CUNY Graduate Center's Stone Center since 2015. The Nobel work explained why similar countries trade similar goods with each other (economies of scale and consumer taste for variety, not comparative advantage) and why industry clusters — the models that made him, ironically for his later politics, one of the profession's clearest defenders of free trade in the 1990s. *The Conscience of a Liberal* (2007) reframed American inequality as a political choice rather than a market outcome; *End This Depression Now!* (2012) was the case for fiscal stimulus against post-2008 austerity, the argument the [[Keynesian Economics]] page carries and the [[MMT]] page contests from the left. ## The columnist, and the exit The *Times* column made him the reference point of the Bush- and Obama-era economic argument — Iraq, the deficit, the stimulus, Obamacare — and the standing target of the right's "Krugman was wrong" genre (the retracted election-night 2016 market prediction earned a Trump "Fake News Award"). He left the paper on December 9, 2024, saying editors had pressed him to avoid content that might get readers "particularly on the right" riled up, and moved to Substack, where his wife Robin Wells edits a newsletter that by mid-2025 reached 350,000–450,000 subscribers — a case study in the [[Substack Timeline]]'s account of columnists trading institutional reach for independence. ## 2025–26: the tariff argument The second Trump term returned Krugman to his original field. His Substack has been the most-cited running critique of the [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] — that they are a tax on American consumers and manufacturers, that "reciprocal" rates were derived from trade deficits rather than foreign tariffs, and that retaliation and supply-chain disruption outweigh any protective gain — and Trump has responded personally, calling him a "deranged bum". His [[NATO Summit Ankara 2026]] and Spain commentary ([[Donald Trump - I dont want to do any more trade with Spain]]) and his on-record assessments of the President's cognition ([[J.B. Pritzker - Donald Trump is suffering from dementia]], [[Paul Krugman - non compos mentis]]) are why he appears in the Quotes folder as often as the Economics one. ## See Also - [[Joseph Stiglitz]] · [[Thomas Piketty]] · [[Keynesian Economics]] · [[MMT]] · [[Classical Economics]] · [[Economics Hub]] - [[Great Divergence]] · [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] · [[Substack]] · [[Substack Timeline]] - [[Paul Krugman - non compos mentis]] · [[Donald Trump - I dont want to do any more trade with Spain]]