Welcome to my home page. The main purpose of this page is to give interested parties - students, colleagues, journalists, mad bombers, etc. - easy access to some of my more recent writings. For the time being the links in this page lead only to less-formal writing, mainly for nonprofessional publications.
Most people who have accessed this page probably know who I am, but for anyone else here is a summary. I am the Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT (the title plus 85 cents will get you a cup of coffee). I was born in 1953, got my Ph.D. from MIT in 1977, and have since taught at Yale and Stanford as well as MIT. I also spent an eye-opening year working at the White House (Council of Economic Advisers) in 1982-3. In 1991 I received my major professional gong, the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Economic Association every two years to an economist under 40.
I have written or edited 16 books (I think) and several hundred articles. Most of these are about international trade (I helped found the so-called "new trade theory", which is about the consequences of increasing returns and imperfect competition for international trade) and international finance, and are pretty well incomprehensible to laymen. However, since I wrote The Age of Diminished Expectations in 1989, I have increasingly tried to communicate with non-economists through op-eds, magazine articles, and so on. It turns out that people have a hard time tracking all of this stuff down; hence this page. It contains, among other things, links to my monthly column "The dismal scientist" in the cyberspace magazine Slate.
With any luck, you will find many of these pieces extremely annoying. My belief is that if an op-ed or column does not greatly upset a substantial number of people, the author has wasted the space. This is particularly true in economics, where many people have strong views and rather fewer have taken the trouble to think those views through - so that simply insisting on being clear-headed about an issue is usually enough to enrage many if not most of your readers.
But read the articles and judge for yourself.
Articles
Slate Magazine/The Dismal Science
"Down-sizing
Downsizing" (6/24/96)
"How
Copper Came a Cropper" (7/19/96)
"Supply-Side
Virus Strikes Again" (8/15/96)
"The Lost
Fig Leaf" (9/27/96)
"Economic
Culture Wars" (10/24/96)
"The
Gold Bug Variations" (11/22/96)
"The CPI
and the Rat Race" (12/21/96)
"The
Accidental Theorist" (1/23/97)
"Vulgar
Keynesians" (2/6/97)
"In
Praise of Cheap Labor" (3/20/97)
"Earth
in the Balance Sheet" (4/17/97)
"Rat
Democracy" (5/15/97)
"Unmitigated
Gauls" (6/05/97)
"The
East is in the Red" (7/17/97)
Other Writings
"White collars
turn blue" The New York Times Magazine, 9/29/96
"An exchange with
Jude Wanniski "
" Ricardo's difficult
idea "
Copyright © 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology