Playboy Interview: Paul Krugman
How can winning a Nobel Prize in economics seem like it’s no big deal? Well, if you’ve already won the John Bates Clark Medal—an honor bestowed biennially on the American economist under 40 who has made major contributions to his profession—you’ve already taken home a piece of hardware considered by many economists to be slightly harder to win than a Nobel. Only 12 people have won both, including Paul Krugman, who collected the 1991 Clark and then snagged the Nobel (and its $1.4 million check) in 2008.
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Pointing to his relentless attacks on the Bush administration—which usually included creative ways to say “liar”—conservatives fume that Krugman is a partisan Democrat. The current occupant of the White House may politely disagree with that accusation, as Krugman has also directed withering criticism at Barack Obama. Krugman is not hitting a man when he’s down: While many of his peers in intellectual circles were swooning, Krugman was blistering candidate Obama during the 2008 Democratic primaries.
But there is a difference between the Bush years and now: This administration frets about what Krugman says, partly because of his ideas but mainly because his voice is listened to by legions of liberals disappointed with what they perceive to be the president’s failures. The administration courts him—he has dined on roast beef with the president at the White House, along with such other critics as fellow Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. Krugman’s tone of “I knew it first” and “If you had listened to me…” can be annoying to some politicos. But the problem is that he has more often than not been right.
PLAYBOY sent noted economics writer Jonathan Tasini to find out Krugman’s thinking about the current economic crisis, the Obama administration’s handling of the financial meltdown, the politics rippling through the country as the 2012 presidential election looms and whether anything can be done to drag us back from the abyss. After many hours of conversation in New York and in Krugman’s Princeton University office, Tasini says, “Krugman is a man who made his reputation, in part, on his fascination with and intellectual work on financial panics and collapses. So he is in his element now because he loves a good crisis. As he admitted candidly, he is not a bright-eyed, slap-you-on-the-back, optimistic cheerleader. Quite the opposite. The global economy is giving him a great canvas to draw a depressing picture, but he’s also agitating for action that he says can get us out of the mess we’re in.”
Playboy Interview: Paul Krugman