The Partisan from Economic Principals by David Warsh Paul Krugman, a trade theorist of sufficient accomplishments that he is on many persons' short list for a share of a Nobel Prize some day, surprised nearly everyone in 2000 when he quit his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to go to work as a twice-week-columnist for The New York Times, with a teaching sinecure at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on the side.
Since then, he's surprised them again, this time by becoming one of the best economic journalists in the world. Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, provides a better narrative of international economics; the venerable Peter Bernstein, in his newsletters and books, a deeper insight into financial markets. And it's widely recognized, I believe, that Krugman, when he makes his arguments, can't keep him thumb off the scale, an unfortunate tendency that often undermines their force, and probably disqualifies him from consideration for a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary (that is, if his his constant spanking of the media for not seeing events through his eyes weren't enough). Want a fresh example? Take last Friday's column, where Krugman describes the origins of the sub-prime crisis... In Full: http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2008.01.20/301.html
