Very interesting profile via Tyler Cowen, who, I think, dances around the most interesting issues in the article and comments on Krugman’s travel habits and his Sci-Fi love instead. Maybe he’s worried about engaging with the prickly stuff. He teases us, however, with this:
and there is an interesting discussion of how his wife edits his work
Interesting? I’ll say (quotes below are from the New Yorker piece):
these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier.
On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant.
“When Robin and I started writing about health care, single payer was clearly the way to go. And then bit by bit you start saying, ‘O.K., you take what you can get.’ There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into—you let your vision of what should be get completely taken over by what appears possible right now—and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.”
Is Krugman’s famed brilliant yet mean-spirited persona really a combination of his and his wife’s views? Is she the mean part and he the brilliant part? Yikes, don’t want to touch that, but we should probably at least consider “Paul Krugman, NYT Columnist” an avatar for the Krugman couple together.
Would Robin Wells still want her avatar to be so angry if it was her name at the top of the column?
Not Unreasonable 