Steve Reads

I was smiling all day at the news that Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics (technically “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” but “nobody cares, you know”). Krugman’s work on the economics of location — why cities and firms and other bundles of stuff appear where they do — is outstanding. His writing is the height of lucidity; someone — can’t remember who — described him as the best economics writer since Keynes, which is saying a lot.

And of course it thrills me that the pre-eminent voice for American liberals, a man who’s been unfailingly right about the Bush administration for eight years, would be honored in this way. His Conscience of a Liberal is a must-read for all Americans who might have forgotten what 20th century American politics were about. In short: there’s always been a vicious, reactionary side of American society just waiting for the opportunity to devour the rest of us. Teddy Roosevelt called them the “malefactors of great wealth.” FDR called them out — “the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” (Listen to that speech the whole way through. It’ll give you chills.) Krugman redraws this arc, whose lines grow fuzzy as the years go by. He reminds us why we’re liberals, and that the enemies haven’t changed.

He’s done more than anyone since J.K. Galbraith, perhaps, to de-romanticize economics and explain it — intelligently but simply — to a lay audience. Take, for instance, Krugman’s essay Who Was Milton Friedman? It’s not only a brilliant takedown of capitalism’s avatar; it’s also a pretty darned good intro to Keynesian macroeconomics. As Daniel Davies put it in the Crooked Timber link above, Krugman is “the public voice of mainstream sensible Keynesianism”.

Since I am a non-modest person, I’ll also link here to what I’ve written about Krugman before, in case it inspires one or two of you to read his non-political work:

• The Return of Depression Economics: tries to understand why economies throughout the world were collapsing or threatening to collapse in the 90’s, when the world’s technocrats were thought to have mastered the tools of macroeconomic control.
• Development, Geography, and Economic Theory: explains the economics of location, the work that made Krugman famous within economics. (It’s safe to say that without an MIT and Princeton pedigree in economics, Krugman would never have gotten a job writing for the New York Times, and would thereby never have established himself as the standard-bearer for American liberalism.)
• The Self-Organizing Economy: a light version of Development, Geography, and Economic Theory. The repetition is fine, because both are excellently written and short. Development is a bit more technical and inward-looking than The Self-Organizing Economy.
• Pop Internationalism, about the (Thomas Friedman-style) economic bollocks that passes for discussion of globalization. (Daniel Davies calls it Globollocks.) I couldn’t let discussion of this book pass without linking to Cosma Shalizi’s review, which is a terrific piece of work.

The culmination of all Krugman’s work in location theory is The Spatial Economy, with Fujita and Venables. I’ve meant to read it for a while, so I ordered a used copy today off Amazon. If anyone’s interested in reading it along with me, let me know.

Oh, I should thank Cosma here for pointing me to basically every one of these Krugman works. Without him, I’d only have known Krugman for his columns and his political works. The more purely economic works pay great dividends.