Paul Krugman is a columnist at the New York Times and a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. In 1991 the American Economic Association awarded him its John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." In 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. His books include The Accidental Theorist and The Conscience of a Liberal.With Sophie Roell at FiveBooks, Krugman discussed why he considers himself a liberal as well as five books that inspired him, including:
Essays in PersuasionRead about another book on Krugman's list.
by John Maynard Keynes
Let’s talk a bit more about Keynes’s Essays in Persuasion. I think you warned me that you need to know a bit about the history of the time to fully understand it, but I really enjoyed reading it. He has some great comments about stay-at-home wives getting depressed, which I hadn’t expected at all. He’s also very prescient about the Treaty of Versailles and the devastating effects that would have. He really was a Cassandra in that regard. And he has some pretty good predictions about the future, and how prosperous society will become…
Well, some of them. This business about us becoming so rich that people would stop caring about consuming even more, that turns out not to be true. About enough time has passed for that blissful state to have arrived according to him, and somehow greed always finds a way. But yes, the comments on Versailles are amazing.
He also has a bit of a discussion about whether or not he is a liberal. He has this great quote, that “if the Liberal Party is to recover its forces, it must have an attitude, a philosophy and a direction”.
So this is an old Liberal, with a capital L – the Liberal Party of England, which was the old opposition to the forces of conservatism, which was then displaced by the rise of the Labour Party [which was further to the left] in the first half of the 20th century. That’s a very different kind of problem from what we have now. Keynes was not happy with the Labour Party. I suspect had I lived in his time I would have been more sympathetic to the Labour Party than he was, but he was obviously repelled by the Conservatives.
I think it was the Liberals who introduced the beginnings of a welfare state in England, though.
They introduced some pieces of it. The full thing came from the Labour Party after World War II. And obviously Keynes supported that. We probably could say that Keynes was what we could call a liberal in America now, or a moderate social democrat in Europe.
But you think you’re a bit further to the left than Keynes? You’re definitely more pro-trade union than he was.
I think that’s partly because I’ve got an additional 75 years of, critically, US political economy to look back at. I’m a bit uncertain about the strictly economic role of trade unions, but the political importance of having a counterweight to big business is just overwhelming.
--Marshal Zeringue
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