It's hard to take anything Krugman writes seriously. All his writing is so intertwined with his politics It's impossible to sort the factually sound parts from the rest and he has a track record of saying some truly wrong things with great conviction.
I always assumed that his Nobel prize was more due to the awarding committee wanting to support his political views rather than any real economic insight. Pretty much like how Obama was given the Peace Prize when the nominations were due when he had only been in office a few months. Politics, all politics.
It's hard to find anyone who doesn't think he earned that price, even among those economists who roll their eyes very hard at his current political writings.
He painted the Chicago Boys, who went back to Latin America and gave political cover to anti-communist dictators using death squads, as radicals.. Krugman has a lot of respect for Friedman's contributions to understanding stagflation and the development of monetarism.
The Krugman haters should find some nice balance in the above essay after Friedman's death where Krugman praises Friedman's economic chops but laments his looser standards when he gets too political.
By predicting the phenomenon of stagflation in advance, Friedman and Phelps achieved one of the great triumphs of postwar economics. This triumph, more than anything else, confirmed Milton Friedman’s status as a great economist’s economist, whatever one may think of his other roles.
Krugman used to think like a typical economist, but abandoned this approach and subsequently became a celebrated columnist. Ironically this was years after he wrote an essay complaining how the economists who became popular were rarely the ones who had a good understanding of economic theory:
Yes, I'm sure. He reminds me of Fox News which I also can't stand because their political commentary is so intertwined with the news that you can't sort out the facts.
