- Person
- Paul Krugman
- Lived
- b. 1953
- Field
- Economics
- From
- American
The story
Paul Krugman has long believed that economics should be explained clearly. He first discovered his gift for writing serious economics in plain English while working in Washington in 1982 and 1983, and beyond his research he has written textbooks used by students around the world.
He had been teaching through his writing for years. In the late 1980s he wrote The Age of Diminished Expectations, a primer on the US economy for a Washington Post series that, he said, turned out to be a kind of stealth textbook: it turned the country's real economic problems into a series of parables illustrating economic principles, with sophisticated models hidden under plain prose. It reached a far larger audience than anything he had written before.
With Maurice Obstfeld he co-wrote International Economics: Theory and Policy, which became a standard undergraduate textbook in its field. Then he teamed up with his wife, the economist Robin Wells. Born in 1959, Wells earned her BA at the University of Chicago and her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, held a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, and has taught or done research at the University of Michigan, the University of Southampton, Stanford, MIT and Princeton. The couple married in 1996.
Together they wrote two college textbooks: Microeconomics, published in October 2004, and Macroeconomics, published in September 2005. Krugman has said that their undergraduate text was strongly inspired by the first edition of Paul Samuelson's classic textbook, which had introduced generations of students to the subject from 1948.
The books proved durable and have been revised many times; a seventh edition of Macroeconomics appeared in 2024. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Krugman is the second most frequently cited author on college economics syllabi.
Wells has remained a close collaborator. She serves as editor of the daily newsletter Krugman began publishing after leaving The New York Times at the end of 2024, which by mid-2025 was reaching between 350,000 and 450,000 readers per post. Krugman is the author or editor of more than 20 books in all.
Why it matters
Krugman's textbooks have helped countless students learn the basic tools of economics in clear, engaging language.
About Paul Krugman
Nobel-winning economist who explained why similar countries trade and why industries cluster, then became America’s most widely read, and most argued-with, economic columnist.
More about Paul Krugman
- Paul Krugman modelled how currency crises happenAs a graduate student interning at the Federal Reserve, Paul Krugman wrote A Model of Balance of Payments Crises, explaining speculative attacks on currencies.
- Paul Krugman co-wrote the bible of new trade theoryWith Elhanan Helpman of Tel Aviv University, Paul Krugman wrote Market Structure and Foreign Trade, the book that brought the new trade theory together.
- Paul Krugman founded the new economic geographyIn a seminal 1991 paper, Increasing Returns and Economic Geography, Paul Krugman began the field that explains why industries and people cluster in cities.
- Paul Krugman explained why similar countries tradeIn 1978 and 1979 Paul Krugman built models showing how economies of scale and consumers' taste for variety drive trade between similar countries.
Sources
- Paul Krugman: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Paul Krugman Wikipedia
- Robin Wells Wikipedia
- Incidents from my career Paul Krugman, MIT
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