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The ultimate Paul Krugman archive is of course The Unofficial Krugman Archive. But I've always been a fan of his September 1992 article on The Rich, The Right, and The Facts, which was one of the earliest and clearest articles written on inequality. Plus, it was published in one of America's most important and prescient journals of public affairs. I'm also fond of Incidents From My Career, in which Krugman reveals an adolescent love of Isaac Asimov novels, and suggests that he became an economist because it was the closest he could get to being one of the Psychohistorians from the Foundation trilogy. It also contains this personal history of the work that led to Krugman's Nobel:
I had learned about monopolistic competition from a short course given by Bob Solow in 1976, and I guess the idea of applying the new models to trade had been percolating in my mind ever since. I have, however, a typical pattern in my work: I will have a foggy idea that I play with occasionally, sometimes for years; then some event will suddenly cause the fog to lift, revealing an almost fully developed model. In this case, in January 1978 I paid a visit to Rudi Dornbusch to talk about my work, and prepared a list of possible ideas, including as an afterthought the idea of a monopolistically competitive trade model. When he flagged the idea as interesting, I went home to work on it the next day -- and knew within a few hours that I had the key to my whole career in hand. I distinctly remember staying up all night in excitement, feeling that I had just seen a vision on the road to Damascus.Of course it took a while to convince anyone else of the truth of that vision. In fact the next year and a half was deeply frustrating: rejections by journals, lack of interest by most of my senior colleagues (though much support from Carlos Diaz-Alejandro), and a decision by the Yale department not to give me a research fellowship. I persevered, however, and in the spring of 1979 another patch of fog lifted, and I saw my way clear to integrate monopolistic competition and comparative advantage. (I can again describe the moment of revelation very precisely: the analytical trick that made the model possible came to me at Boston's Logan Airport, where I was waiting for a flight to Minneapolis).I presented the new paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute that July -- an ideal locale, because it guaranteed exposure to an influential group of international economists. I still think, with all of the things that I have done since, that the hour and a half in which I presented that paper was the best 90 minutes of my life. There's a corny scene in the movie Coal Miner's Daughter, in which the young Loretta Lynn performs for the first time in a noisy bar, and little by little everyone gets quiet and starts to listen to her singing. Well, that's what it felt like: I had, all at once, made it.I keep wanting to find the right explanation for the work that won Krugman the Nobel prize, but I'm not confident enough in my own understanding of the theory to do it myself. It would be nice if there were some sort of credentialed economist -- maybe even a Nobel prize winner of some sort -- who is intimately familiar with the paper, an extremely skilled communicator of economic ideas, and has some sort of online web page where he could post an explanation of the winning concept. But who could possibly fit such a description?
