Paul Krugman Demonstrates Why Print Is Better

by Glynnis MacNicol | 2:39 pm, February 22nd, 2010

» 8 comments

Sigh. Granted, Paul Krugman is one of the preeminent columnists and economists on the planet. Also, he’s won the Nobel Prize. Still! I suspect this lifestyle, as described in this week’s New Yorker profile of Krugman, is not one any sort of media person can probably hope to have in the future. Sigh. It certainly sounds nice. Also, nice to see credit his wife Robin Wells being recognized for her blogger-like contributions! Plus, how great is this picture.

First thing when [Paul Krugman] wakes up, he checks out a few Web sites, and if he’s not writing his column that day he and [Robin] Wells will go for a walk on the beach, or they will stroll into Frederiksted and have breakfast at Polly’s, a little coffee shop that serves iced lattes and pretty good egg burritos. If he is writing his column, he will start it on the morning of the day it’s due, and, if the spirit is with him, he will be done soon after lunch. When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot—she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focuses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” Where he had written that the stimulus bill would at best “mitigate the slump, not cure it,” she crossed out that phrase and substituted “somewhat soften the economic hardship that we face for the next few years.” Here and there, she suggested things for him to add. “This would be a good place to flesh out the vehement objections from the G.O.P. and bankers to nationalization,” she wrote on page 9. “Show us all their huffing and puffing before you dismiss it as nonsense in the following graf.”

On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant. She pushed him to denounce the filibuster. She wanted him to be more stubborn in holding out for the public option in the health-care bill. He spent a few sleepless nights wrestling with his conscience about that but ultimately decided that a flawed bill was so much better than no bill at all that he had to support it. “You can get beaten down,” he says. “When Robin and I started writing about health care, single payer was clearly the way to go. And then bit by bit you start saying, ‘O.K., you take what you can get.’ There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into—you let your vision of what should be get completely taken over by what appears possible right now—and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.”

In the late afternoon, they lie on beach loungers underneath a clump of sea-grape trees, facing the ocean. Krugman sips a piña colada through a straw and reads the galleys of a book about the financial crisis. They were thinking of having dinner at a place in town, but then they discovered that there was to be an Elvis impersonator singing there, so they decided to go to the Sunset Grill, where the stereo is playing Wings. It’s getting buggy on the beach, and Wells hands Krugman a can of Off. The tide is coming in. Krugman puts his book down, eases himself out of his lounger, and, still wearing his hat and sunglasses, wades cautiously into the sea.

New York Times, Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, The New Yorker

http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Callan/100000200979966 Joe Callan

“On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant”

Ah, so the agenda is his columns isn’t really even *his own* agenda. That seems odd–I wouldn’t have figured that Krugman needed help preaching to the choir of fundamentalist Keynesian worshippers who already agree with him.
http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Boyer/602168764 John Boyer

Instead of children, they have two cats. No wonder he keeps pushing for deficit spending. It’s not like he has any children who will have to foot the bill.
Azarkhan

“In the late afternoon, they lie on beach loungers underneath a clump of sea-grape trees, facing the ocean. Krugman sips a piña colada through a straw and reads….” And I bet they can’t see a negro for miles; that’s why they’re liberal!
http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Callan/100000200979966 Joe Callan

And in my urgency to put in the first snarky comment about Krugman, I commit a fatal typo. What a karmatic left hook. :|
http://www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Jones/1384303476 Chris Jones

LOL! I can’t believe every cliche and stereotype we Conservatives have about liberals, especially liberal media elites was confirmed in a single piece. Latte sipping, piña colada drinking on the beach, it’s all there! The only thing missing is him driving somewhere in his Prius. I’m a little surprised he had a can of OFF! in his possession though. The eco-nuts aren’t going to like that.
Jim R

Yes, let’s punch Paul around, since the Masters Of The Universe from the Chicago School have all been vindicated with their tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and Hooverite/Mellon pre-Great Depression thinking.

Remember, Paul, if you criticize unbridled corporate power and the forty-year transfer of wealth from the middle class to the elite that caused the 2nd Republican Depression in less than a hundred years; they’ll speak really ill of you.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Callan/100000200979966 Joe Callan

“since the Masters Of The Universe from the Chicago School have all been vindicated”

Funny you should mention that, Jim, because if the Chicago School was actually alive and well, a lot of greedy companies (you know, the “evil” rich dudes the left is consistently complaining about) would’ve gone down in flames in 2008 instead of being rescued by our benevolent government. But thanks to the wisdom of both Bush and Obama, and despite the government’s already massive and over-reaching debt, we made a wasteful attempt to save any and every corporation so long as they have a voice in Washington.

Also, keep in mind that unbridled corporate power happens anyway when you invite lobbyists from the industries you allege as “evil” to help write the regulations that are supposed to be leashing them.

What a joke. Krugman complains about corporate power, then he spurs the administration to throw more money around….money which ultimately gets siphoned back into the corporations he so vehemently rails against.

But no, you’re right…the man must be brilliant. He won a Nobel, after all. That has to mean something.
Jim R

“But thanks to the wisdom of both Bush and Obama, and despite the government’s already massive and over-reaching debt, we made a wasteful attempt to save any and every corporation so long as they have a voice in Washington.”

I’m not sure how that’s related to a profile of an economist who, along with Stiglitz, Roubini, Dean Baker, and a cast of thousands were equally ignored as they warned of impending disaster going back to the dismantling of New Deal market protections by both parties.

As Greenspan succinctly testified to Congress, the whole “free markets” concept as espoused by the Randian trickle-down “economists” from “The Chicago School”, who endlessly promoted deregulation and the notion that corporations and wealthy investors would always only act in their long term interests and those of the country as a whole, was an utter fantasy.

The fact that both parties now cater to those powerful interests above the best interests of a vast majority of the American people, obviously fearing the wrath of the former more than that of the latter; is an indictment of Buckley V Valeo and the Citizen’s United rulings that sold out our Democracy to the highest bidder, but does not constitute an intelligent refutation of Keynesian Economics or the abject failure of “Reaganomics” vis a vis tax cuts and deregulation.

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