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Paul Krugman: 212 quotes1 like

“Many of the stories economists tell take the form of models—for whatever else they are, economic models are stories about how the world works.”

Paul Krugman

Preface
Economics (4th ed., 2015)

“… politics determine who has the power, not who has the truth.”

Paul Krugman

The Australian Financial Review, 6 September 2010, p. 15, "Time for Obama to abandon caution". Also seen in the Sacramento Bee http://www.sacbee.com/2010/09/04/3004829/obama-should-aim-high-on-stimulus.html

“I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.”

Paul Krugman book The Conscience of a Liberal

Source: The Conscience of a Liberal (2007), Ch. 13. The Conscience of a Liberal http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=5887. W. W. Norton & Company. 352 pages ISBN 978-0-393-06069-0, 1st edition (2007)

“To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.”

Paul Krugman

"Dubya's Double Dip?" http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html, The New York Times, 2 August 2002<br>:It should be noted that Krugman was being sarcastic http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/when-someone-says-paul-krugman-called-for-greenspan-to-create-a-housing-bubble-back-in-2002-they-are-trying-to-say-that-they-are-either-a-fool-or-a-liar; two weeks later, he wrote an article http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/16/opinion/mind-the-gap.html warning about the dangers of a housing bubble. <br class="br">The New York Times Columns

“There was a limited literature on external economies and international trade before 1978. It was never, however, very influential, because it seemed terminally messy; even the simplest models became bogged down in a taxonomy of possible outcomes. What has since become clear is that this messiness arose in large part because the modelers were asking their models to do what traditional trade models do, which is to predict a precise pattern of specialization and trade.”

Paul Krugman

How I Work (1993)

“That's a hard answer to accept, especially for those American policy intellectuals who recoil from the dreary task of reducing deficits and raising the national savings rate. But economics is not a dismal science because the economists like it that way; it is because in the end we must submit to the tyranny not just of the numbers, but of the logic they express.”

Paul Krugman

Pop Internationalism (1996), Asia's Miracle (1994)

“Economists can often be remarkably obtuse, failing to see things that are right in front of them. But sometimes a bit of obtuseness is not entirely a bad thing.”

Paul Krugman

Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (1995), Ch. 2. Geography Lost and Found

“It’s a great honour to be asked to give this talk, especially because I’m arguably not qualified to do so. I am, after all, not a Keynes scholar, nor any kind of serious intellectual historian. Nor have I spent most of my career doing macroeconomics. Until the late 1990s my contributions to that field were limited to international issues; although I kept up with macro research, I avoided getting into the frontline theoretical and empirical disputes.”

Paul Krugman

" Mr Keynes and the moderns http://www.voxeu.org/article/mr-keynes-and-moderns/" (June 21, 2011)

“When the economy is in a depression, scarcity ceases to rule. Productive resources sit idle, so that it is possible to have more of some things without having less of others; free lunches are all around. As a result, all the usual rules of economics are stood on their head; we enter a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly. Thrift hurts our future prospects; sound money makes us poorer. Moreover, that's the kind of world we have been living in for the past several years, which means that it is a kind of world that students should understand. […] Depression economics is marked by paradoxes, in which seemingly virtuous actions have perverse, harmful effects. Two paradoxes in particular stand out: the paradox of thrift, in which the attempt to save more actually leads to the nation as a whole saving less, and the less-well-known paradox of flexibility, in which the willingness of workers to protect their jobs by accepting lower wages actually reduces total employment. […] In times of depression, the rules are different. Conventionally sound policy – balanced budgets, a firm commitment to price stability – helps to keep the economy depressed. Once again, this is not normal. Most of the time we are not in a depression. But sometimes we are – and 2013, when this chapter was written, was one of those times.”

Paul Krugman

“Depressions are Different”, in Robert M. Solow, ed. Economics for the Curious: Inside the Minds of 12 Nobel Laureates. 2014.

“Many of those who reject the idea of economic models are ill-informed or even (perhaps unconsciously) intellectually dishonest.”

Paul Krugman

Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (1995), Ch. 3. Models and Metaphors

“Democrats have to figure out why the white working class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem.”

Paul Krugman

The New York Times Columns, The Populism Perplex (November 25, 2016)

“So you can take your pick as to which Mundell you prefer; but the Nobel committee basically honored Mundell the younger, the economist who was iconoclastic enough to imagine that Canada, of all places, was the economy of the future--and was right.”

Paul Krugman

"O Canada", Slate (October 19, 1999)

“International trade in goods and services has expanded steadily over the past six decades thanks to declines in shipping and communication costs, globally negotiated reductions in government trade barriers, the widespread outsourcing of production activities, and a greater awareness of foreign cultures and products. New and better communications technologies, notably the Internet, have revolutionized the way people in all countries obtain and exchange information.”

Paul Krugman

Paul R. Krugman, Maurice Obstfeld, and Marc J. Melitz, International Economics: Theory & Policy, 9th edition (2012)

“I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.
2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.
3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.
4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.”

Paul Krugman

Keynesianism Explained http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-explained (September 15, 2015) <br class="br">The Conscience of a Liberal blog

“If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocate Free Trade”

Paul Krugman Is Free Trade Passé?

"Is Free Trade Passé?", The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1987)

“If economists ruled the world, there would be no need for a World Trade Organization. The economist's case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case- that is, it says that a country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.”

Paul Krugman

"What should trade negotiators negotiate about?" Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1997)

“You can’t explain the votes of places like Clay County as a response to disagreements about trade policy. The only way to make sense of what happened is to see the vote as an expression of, well, identity politics — some combination of white resentment at what voters see as favoritism toward nonwhites (even though it isn’t) and anger on the part of the less educated at liberal elites whom they imagine look down on them.”

Paul Krugman

The New York Times Columns, The Populism Perplex (November 25, 2016)

“It has been obvious for quite a while that Sanders — not just his supporters, not even just his surrogates, but the candidate himself — has a problem both in facing reality and in admitting mistakes.”

Paul Krugman

Questions of Character http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/democratic-groundhog-day/ (May 17, 2016) <br class="br">The Conscience of a Liberal blog

“Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology. Why is economics such a hard subject? Part of the answer has to do with complexity. The economy cannot be put in a box. […] Another reason economics is hard is that the critical sociologist is right: it involves human beings, who do not behave in simple, mechanical ways.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Preface
Peddling Prosperity (1994)

“If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. … There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”

Paul Krugman

on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS", August 21, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/15/paul-krugman-fake-alien-invasion_n_926995.html