World Thinkers 2015: Paul Krugman

A Nobel laureate and Princeton professor, Krugman continues to shape international economic debate, primarily through his New York Times column and accompanying blog.

Krugman has attacked supporters of austerity for keeping economies—and their people—in unnecessary pain. And he is still at it—in a recent blog post, he wrote witheringly of “people who are supposedly ‘close to the markets’ and whose vast experience and intuition grant them insights denied to nerdy economists with their little models.”

He has also endorsed the aims of the new Syriza government in Greece, arguing that the Greek request for some relaxation of the requirement that it run large primary surpluses is entirely reasonable. “I can’t think,” he wrote in February, “what basis Germany can use to reject this proposal out of hand... The point for now is that Syriza is making sense.”