Paul Krugman

On April 21 Princeton held a memorial service for Uwe Reinhardt, one of our greatest health care economists. I had the great honor of being one of the speakers, and I thought I'd share the text I prepared. As you might guess, over the years I've gotten to know quite a few economists. Some of these ...

WASHINGTON: Since Donald Trump's election, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has become delusional. Too numerous to name but one, Krugman's columns take a position that is not just biased but completely void of reality. His latest column, “The Great Snake Oil Slump” continues ...

[Receive the day's most urgent debates right in your inbox by subscribing to the Opinion Today newsletter.] So why is this time different? I don't think it's the specifics of tax policy. Bush and Trump both pushed through big tax cuts for the rich with what amounted to loss-leader cuts for some middle-class ...

I don't know what will happen in the midterm elections. But if Republicans pull it out – that is, if they lose the popular vote by a small enough margin that gerrymandering and the geographic concentration of nonwhite voters frustrate the public's will – it will be the result of tribalism. It won't be because the ...

Even now, in this age of Trump, there are a substantial number of opinion leaders — especially, but not only, in the news media — whose careers, whose professional brands, rest on the notion that they stand above the political fray. For such people, asserting that both sides have a point, that there are ...

If you've been watching stock markets, you're probably feeling seasick. The Dow is crashing! No, it's bouncing back! Wait, it's crashing again! In general, trying to explain stock fluctuations is a mug's game. But in this case it's pretty clear what's going on. Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will ...

As I write this, China's announcement of a new round of tit-for-tat tariffs has stoked fears of trade war and sent stock futures plunging. If this morning's futures hold, the S&P 500 will be about 10.5 percent off its January peak, around 6 percent off its level when Gary Cohn, the last of the Trump “globalists,” was ...

These days almost everyone has the (justified) sense that America is coming apart at the seams. But this isn't a new story, or just about politics. Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: Political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality ...

The other day the Trump administration announced a trade deal with South Korea. It also announced that President Donald Trump was nominating the White House physician to head the Department of Veterans Affairs. Both announcements indicate how Mr. Trump views his job: that it's not about ...

Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, President Trump's physician, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, discussed the results of the president's physical in January.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times. Image Paul Krugman. By Paul Krugman. March 29, 2018. The other day the Trump ...

“Trade wars are good, and easy to win.” So declared Donald Trump a few weeks ago, after announcing tariffs on steel and aluminum. Actually, trade wars are rarely good, and not at all easy to win — especially if you have no idea what you're doing. And boy, do these people not know what they're doing.

A 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Some zombie ideas — bad ideas that won't die — are still embraced by Republicans, like trickle-down economics.CreditEmmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Image Paul Krugman. By Paul Krugman. March 19, 2018. Almost four decades ...

Paul Krugman took questions from readers about trade after President Trump's announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Here are his answers to some of the hundreds of questions he received. — By the Editors. 1. Literally every small consumer item I buy is made in China. Please explain ...

There's near-universal consensus among both economists and business leaders that Donald Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum are a bad idea, and that the wider trade war those tariffs could trigger would be very destructive. But the chances of heading off this policy disaster are small, because this is a ...

OK, Trump has gone ahead with steel and aluminum tariffs, with an exemption for Canada and Mexico if they renegotiate NAFTA (which seems to make nonsense of the supposed national security rationale, but whatever). This is potentially a very big deal; we could be looking at the unwinding of the whole ...

Imagine that you're listening to some garrulous old guy in a diner, telling you what's wrong with the world — which mainly involves how we're being victimized and taken advantage of by foreigners. You hear him out; after all, there have been approximately 17,000 news analyses telling us that garrulous old ...

We've known all along that Donald Trump is belligerently ignorant about economics (and many other things). But up to this point that hasn't mattered much. He took office amid a sustained recovery that began under his predecessor, and that recovery had already lifted the U.S. economy to the point where ...

But oh, did I wish that somehow New York Times columnist (and economist and Nobel laureate) Paul Krugman had been the one asking the questions. Krugman's column reacting to the news that Ryan was departing called Ryan a “flimflam” man, a term Krugman has used consistently for about six years to ...

Peter Thiel, Facebook investor and Donald Trump supporter, is by all accounts a terrible person. He did, however, come up with one classic line about the disappointments of modern technology: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” O.K., now it's 280, but who's counting? The point of his ...

Don Blankenship (second from left) was sentenced to prison for conspiring to violate mine safety standards. He appears now to have a real chance in the Republican Party's primary in the West Virginia Senate race.CreditF. Brian Ferguson/Gazette-Mail, via Associated Press. Image Paul Krugman. By Paul ...