I was psyched to learn that Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize. Reading his NY Times columns, it’s sometimes been easy to forget that he’s not just a pundit/commentator but a world-class economist. He must have a swelled head now. He and Al Gore can have private little “I Won a Nobel Prize on the Side” parties.
I recently went back and, to help my mother win an argument with a friend who denied that Krugman had correctly predicted the financial mess, pulled together some especially prescient columns from the last six years:
Aug 2002 — discussing our housing bubble
March 2003 — who lost the US budget
May 2003 — the lunatics are in charge of the asylum — our fiscal train wreck
May 2004 – our looming oil crisis
May 2005 — our housing bubble
From May 27, 2003:
How can this be happening? Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They don’t realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and they …imagine that the Bush administration, like the Reagan administration, will modify our system only at the edges, that it won’t destroy the social safety net built up over the past 70 years.
But the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need…. [W]hen will the public wake up?
Ivan Kreilkamp 