Thursday, October 16, 2008

Economist-blogger's Nobel


American progressives' happiness about Paul Krugman's Nobel is as strong as the unhappiness (and probably deep funk) of conservatives. Which has led to a fun contest which is now open for voting.

* * *

Krugman himself has a couple of light-hearted posts. The first one announced the award with a one-liner: "A funny thing happened to me this morning ..." And the second one linked to a fun piece by Andy Borowitz.

He also has a post explaining his Nobel-winning pieces of work in plain English.

* * *

Fellow econ-bloggers have been quite effusive in their appreciation/praise:

  1. Marginal Revolution: Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

  2. Ed Glaeser: Honoring Paul Krugman

  3. Dani Rodrik: Four Cheers for Paul Krugman

  4. Crooked Timber: John Quiggin and Daniel Davies.

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    "Again, this may seem obvious, and it is now – but it wasn’t before 1991 or so. As with trade, the plain English version was possible only after the mathematical models had been worked out."

    Not sure about that, the mathematical models just created numbers, and thereby institutional legitimacy, to the folk intuition. If you asked the people who moved to the manufacturing areas why they moved there, they would say because the jobs were there, which is not very different from the "discovery" of geographical concentration.

    I like Krugman, particularly the way he turns Economics into English, which is what it should be, really. It is totally unclear to me why economics needs mathematical models, survey data should do. They should rename the economics "Nobel" something else. Pulitzer for Obfuscation would be good.

  2. Rahul Siddharthan said...

    And don't forget Maureen Dowd.