Interview with Paul Krugman
"We have some financial bubbles out there"


A typical late-summer Barcelona thunderstorm was rolling overhead as Paul Krugman took his seat in the neo-classical surroundings of IESE's central building. It seemed a ra-ther appropriate accompaniment to the thoughts of a man whose pronouncements have often controversially resounded through the halls of government and rattled the windows of academic economic thinking. During one answer, a particularly loud thunderclap elicited a joking retraction, though one has the impression that this is a man who wouldn't shy away from stating his case regardless of the lightning bolts being thrown at him. In spite of his enfant terrible reputation however, he is highly personable and has a gift for explaining even the most complex of economic theories in language that is easily understood by those untrained in advanced economics

Paul Krugman, was born in 1953 and is the Ford International Professor of Economics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has also taught at Stanford and Yale. In 1991 he received the John Bates Clark Medal (awarded by the American Economic Association every two years to an economist under 40) and is widely tipped as a future Nobel laureate. He has written or edited 16 books and has published several hundred articles in magazines such as Fortune, the New York Times Magazine and the cyberspace publication Slate.


Resumen

Is economics an exact science?

Well, it's certainly not an exact science like physics. It's more like climatology. Climatologists disagree about a lot but certainly they're helpful in getting us to think about global warming for example. The interesting thing there is that you discover that the apparent range of disagreement is much greater than the real range of disagreement so it's not much different from eco-nomics. If you look at economics, the range of views of people who are not actually paid to express those points of view is wide but not as wide as people imagine.


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