Paul Krugman

Origins and early life

Paul Robin Krugman was born in Albany, New York, on 28 February 1953, the son of David and Anita Krugman, and grew up in Utica and then, from the age of eight, in Merrick on Long Island. He was born into a Jewish family, the grandson of Jewish immigrants: his mother's parents came to the United States from Ukraine in 1914 and his father's from Belarus in 1920.

Work and career

He has said that Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, in which the scientists of the future try to save civilisation with a science of society, first drew him to economics. He graduated from Yale in 1974 and took his doctorate at MIT in 1977 under Rudi Dornbusch, spending the summer of 1976 with a few fellow students at the Bank of Portugal. In a paper of 1979 he showed why so much of world trade takes place between similar countries in similar goods: because firms gain from producing on a large scale and consumers want variety, a country such as Sweden both exports and imports cars.

His 1991 paper on increasing returns and economic geography carried the same reasoning onto the map, showing how falling transport costs draw people and industry into cities and can divide regions into an urbanised high-technology core and a less developed periphery.

Recognition

He taught at Yale, MIT, Stanford and the London School of Economics, worked on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers in 1982 and 1983, received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1991, and moved to Princeton in 2000 and to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2015. The 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences went to him alone, “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity”.

From 2000 to December 2024 he also wrote a column for The New York Times, and he has written textbooks with Maurice Obstfeld and with his wife, the economist Robin Wells.