Paul Krugman bids farewell to ‘The New York Times’ after 25 years as a columnist

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 2008, a professor at the most prestigious universities in the world, a writer and commentator, is bidding farewell to The New York Times after almost 25 years as a columnist for a newspaper from which he has attacked austerity policies (“it is a really bad idea in a depressed economy,” he wrote in 2019), deliberated on current affairs and economic theory, and served as a scourge of the political class. A progressive economist, he has been a staunch critic of Donald Trump —he titled one of his columns Donald Trump and his Team of Morons— and of George W. Bush, both over his economic and foreign policy, severely condemning the war in Iraq. He also criticized more than one decision by the Barack Obama Administration. His departure comes shortly before Trump’s return to the White House, which seems like more than a coincidence. Krugman announced his decision in an article titled: “My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment.”

Just as he began writing in the New York newspaper on January 2, 2000 with a reflection on the state of the world economy, his farewell column includes another one: “This does seem like a good occasion to reflect on what has changed over these past 25 years.” The style is the same as always—direct despite the complexity of the subjects discussed, and sparing with the adjectives—but the tone has taken a radical turn: the hope he felt at the beginning of the new century has been replaced by a feeling of discouragement. “What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment,” writes the economist, whose articles have been published every week in Spanish in the business supplement of EL PAÍS, Negocios.

“And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired,” writes Krugman, who won the Princess of Asturias Award in 2004. “It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.”

Even if not everything was rosy then, there was hope for the future, he writes. Now, resentment prevails instead, fuelled by a collapse of trust in the elites, whether they be elected officials, banks or the tech giants and their billionaire owners. But Krugman expresses some hope for change. “So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there.”

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