Home

The Conversion of Paul

By Jarret Murphy, New York Village Voice, March 8, 2005

"It's the dishonesty, stupid," read a September 10 column in The New York Times. What Dubya did or didn't do in the National Guard 30 years ago wasn't the point. "It's the recent pattern of lies." Not an unusual sentiment these days, yet not the typical thing heard from an economics professor at Princeton whose works include page-turners like "Increasing Returns, Monopolistic Competition, and Inter- national Trade." But then Paul Krugman isn't your typical econ professor.

"It may come as a surprise," he said in a recent lecture at Fordham. "I'm not fond of the policies of the current administration." Everybody got the joke: Krugman has become one of the best-known and most prolific critics of Dubya's doings, from the tax cuts, to Iraq, to Social Security. An audience member asked what Krugman would have done if John Kerry had driven his nemesis from office in November. He replied: "I would have been able to write what I thought I was going to write for the Times, which is serious policy discussions, instead of what I have to do now, which is basically, 'Liar, liar, pants on fire.' "

Indeed, when Krugman's column first appeared in early 2000 he breezed from dissing anti-globalization protesters to dissecting Ecuador's monetary policy. Somehow Krugman got from there to concluding in 2002 that "the Bush administration lies a lot."

What was the turning point? "Really it was the Bush Social Security plan in its initial incarnation during the 2000 campaign," Krugman tells the Voice. "It had never occurred to me that the candidate of one of the two major political parties could go out there saying that two plus one equals four and no one would call him on it."

Since 1990, Krugman has carved a niche as America's living-room economist, penning a series of books translating economic thinking into something that average Joes can digest. The difference now, he says, is that "there is no center in American politics anymore." The left and right disagree not just on policies but on facts as well. "I had envisioned myself as an educator and now I end up being in large part a fact checker or a truth squad on what's really outrageous," Krugman laments.

There is some question as to how his new, politicized role sits with Krugman's fellow economists—especially those who will decide if he wins a Nobel Prize for his work on trade theory. Krugman says he has no idea if the column hurts his chances. "I hope not," he says, "because the academic work stands on its own."

And besides, someone has to keep the press honest. In recent weeks Krugman's column has focused heavily on the flaws in the president's Social Security proposal—flaws the media have downplayed, he says, because the press seems "extremely hostile to Social Security as it is" and "really buys into the notion of a crisis."

This might be because Social Security is an issue that is clearly important but that few in the media really understand. To the press, "it became a badge," Krugman says. "You needed to learn about two paragraphs of stuff and then you could go on a panel and sound like a grave, serious person concerned about the problems of the United States."