He talks like he’s the only adult in the room, but markets have a way of humbling experts.”
To his allies, though, the stubbornness is part of the point. Alan Blinder, a Princeton colleague, recalls faculty seminars where Krugman would defend a contested model for an hour against a roomful of skeptics. “He didn’t raise his voice,” Blinder says. “He just wouldn’t budge until you met him with better data. It’s the same in print.”
By the end of 2024, Krugman left the Times. Officially, it was over tone and frequency. Unofficially, he wanted more room to move.
Now, most mornings begin in his Manhattan apartment. Street noise hums through the windows. A mug ring marks the desk where his laptop sits open to a tangle of economic charts. On one recent day, a fresh Truth Social notification glowed on his phone. He read the jab, grinned, and went back to drafting a Substack essay on fiscal multipliers. Between sentences, the keys clacked in steady rhythm — the kind of sound that could outlast the shouting outside.
“Some people play golf. I fight with trolls. It’s cheaper,” he said, smirking at the screen before returning to his charts.
“The COVID-19 vaccine saved my life,” one reader wrote in the comments, thanking him for defending public health data. Krugman sent back a heart emoji. Then he closed the laptop. The click was sharp in the quiet room, followed by the faint honk of a cab from the street below.
The noise will keep coming. But gravity is gravity. The facts will weigh the same tomorrow as they do today.