Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman fought jet lag and “the small dog living in [his] throat” to deliver his Zócalo lecture to a packed room. Before that, the Nobel Prize winner, Princeton professor, and New York Times columnist sat down for a quick Q&A over a cup of soothing tea.

Q. What do you wake up to?
A. Usually my cats pawing at me in bed wanting food.

Q. What comforts you?
A. Pasta.

Q. If you could live in any other time, past, present or future, when would it be and why?
A. I’d like to live in the ’60s. For one thing, I’d like to see California before it got so built up.

Q. When are you most creative?
A. Random moments, usually, when for whatever reason I’m distracted. Good ideas come when I’m stuck in traffic or getting out of the shower.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. Summer bike trips in Europe.

Q. What worries you the most?
A. The environment. The fate of the planet. Sometimes I think none of what we do matters because there’s so much risk there.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. Probably New York City on a nice spring day.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. Maybe one of the softer social sciences, sociology, something like that. Hopefully when I get around to my next life there will be a lot more to do in sociology, too.

Q. Whose talent would you like to have?
A. What I wish I could do is compose music. I have lots of verbal ideas and some mathematical ones but never a musical idea. That strikes me as inconceivable. I don’t know how that’s done.

Q. Who is your favorite Beatle and why?
A. The problem with the Beatles is they were a lot better in combination than any one of them was individually. McCartney-Lennon dominates either McCartney or Lennon.

Q. What is your favorite season?
A. My least favorite is winter. I like some things about all the other three.

Q. Which teacher most inspired you?
A. Several. Bill Nordhaus when I was an undergraduate. Rudi Dornbusch when I was a graduate student. They really shaped the direction I went.

Q. What is the most unusual time, place, or situation that you came up with a brilliant idea? What was the idea?
A. A lot of the new trade theory fell into place while I was stuck in a terrible traffic jam in Boston wondering if I was going to miss my flight. It was, how do you reconcile these new ideas about trade with the old, how do you produce a synthesis model. I was bogged down in all kinds of unnecessary complexities. While I was sitting their steaming I realized how it would come together.

Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break most often?
A. Probably to lose some weight.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you’ve love to have a beer with?
A. I would love to have just a talk with John Maynard Keynes. We know what he was like in print, and I would like to know what he was like in person.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.


×

Send A Letter To the Editors

    Please tell us your thoughts. Include your name and daytime phone number, and a link to the article you’re responding to. We may edit your letter for length and clarity and publish it on our site.

    (Optional) Attach an image to your letter. Jpeg, PNG or GIF accepted, 1MB maximum.