Sunday, January 20, 2013

Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (2007)

Paul Krugman.
The Conscience of a Liberal.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

Book information: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com; book webpage at author's website; Wikipedia.

You may know that this book's title is the same as the title of the author's blog, and you may thereby infer that this book is a compilation of the author's blog posts, but that would be an incorrect inference. The first (more than) two-thirds of the book is a quick survey of the interaction of economic forces and politics in the U.S. from the first Gilded Age to the present (a second Gilded Age), with the intention of explaining how we got to the current condition of U.S. political economy. In the final few chapters Krugman discusses policies that would improve the economic condition of the vast majority of the U.S. population, first and foremost universal health insurance. Other economists (Joseph E. Stiglitz; James K. Galbraith) have recently published books on the invidious effects of economic inequality; this is Krugman's book on that topic. He makes it clear that the economic inequality we observe in the U.S. today is the result of historical, political processes and policies that deserve wider understanding.

Video:

Paul Krugman, "The Conscience of a Liberal," pdxjustice Media Productions and Powell's City of Book, Portland, Oregon, 03 November 2007.
Watch it on YouTube.

"Book Discussion on The Conscience of a Liberal," Miami Book Fair International, C-SPAN, 11 November 2007.

"The Conscience of a Liberal Interview," Miami Book Fair International, C-SPAN, 11 November 2007.

"Saturday Book and Author Luncheon," BookExpo America, New York, C-SPAN, 02 June 2007.
Introduction of Paul Krugman begins at time 37:00; Krugman's talk ends at 53:25; Q&A begins at 1:10:00. (The other authors are: Muhammad Yunus, Valerie Plame Wilson, Russell Simmons. The moderator is Alan Alda.)

"Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America," New School for Social Research, C-SPAN, 31 January 2006.
Moderator: Laura Flanders. Panelists: Paul Krugman; James Lardner; Meizhu Lui.
This event was associated with the book:
Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences. James Lardner and David Smith, editors. New York: The New Press, 2006.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Note that most of Krugman's observations/words/themes at this 2006 event were incorporated in his 2007 book. (And his comments about comparisons of 1929 inequality levels with 2006 levels and the possible association of that inequality with the economic calamity of 1929 and afterwards certainly appear in his 2008 and 2012 books. However as Krugman notes, a direct mechanism linking inequality and financial crisis has not been established, but their close association is very suggestive.)
inequality.org; see also the Books on Inequality page at inequality.org.

Some Paul Krugman links:

Paul Krugman, Wikipedia.

Paul Krugman, columnist at The New York Times.

The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman, his blog at The New York Times.

Paul R. Krugman, Princeton University.

Paul Krugman, The Increasing Returns Revolution in Trade and Geography, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2008.

The Official Paul Krugman Web Page, MIT.

Paul Krugman, www.KrugmanOnline.com, a website created by his publisher.

Links to my posts on some of Krugman's other books:
Other items:

Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, "The Great Compression: The U.S. Wage Structure at Mid-Century," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1992, vol. 107, pages 1-34.
Also available as: NBER Working Paper No. 3817, August 1991.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2003, 1-39.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-2002," in Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between European and English-Speaking Countries, A.B. Atkinson and T. Piketty editors, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, "The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(4), Fall 2011, 165-190.

Emmanuel Saez, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley.
This page has links from which you can download his papers.

Emmanuel Saez, Wikipedia.

The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality. Wiemer Salverda, Brian Nolan and Timothy M. Smeeding, editors. Oxford University Press, 2011.
[Publisher; Amazon.com.]