Obligatory Post on Krugman's Nobel

2008-10-14 · Original WordPress address

Apparently, I'm obliged to do this. I've said good and bad things about Prof. Krugman in the past (see this link for the good and for links to the bad). I think:

he absolutely deserves this prize... some of my research is based on his "love of varieties" stuff and I dig economic geography
its great that he does so much to popularize economic thinking (even if he sometimes gets in wrong... still he encourages the right debate)
the timing of the prize and the fact he got it alone suggest probably got it for political reasons (i.e. why now? Bush is out of office like any day now.)
commenters making the above point appear to have no clue about the great extent of Prof. Krugman's intellectual contributions

Prof. Feenstra told us in lecture today that he was Krugman's first student at MIT. Here's Prof. Krugman on his students: "A more important regret is that while the MIT course evaluations rate me as a pretty good lecturer, I have not yet succeeded in generating a string of really fine students, the kind who reflect glory on their teacher." He must have hit a dry spell after his first student... In any case, this gives me two degrees of separation from the Nobel prize!