Delivered. Paul Krugman is an economist on the lookout. The columnist at New york times, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008, decided to respond to the dead ends of the American political and economic landscape with his intellectual tools: knowledge acquired through experience, a way of reasoning that is specific to him, but also a computer keyboard. His essay, which is an extension of America skids (Flammarion, 2004), is a collection classified by themes from his chronicles from the early 2000s to March 2019. Thus, a third is devoted to the financial crisis of 2008, the consequences of which are still being felt today.
One of Krugman's main obsessions is about the moral decline of the United States, and what will happen to it. In a column dated February 27, 2006 and entitled "Graduates against oligarchs", he wonders if it is necessary "Worrying about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society", before recalling that history as well as contemporary experience teach that "Very unequal societies also tend to be corrupt".
Trumpism is bellicose ignorance applied to all areas
Among his favorite Turkish faces is chiefly Donald Trump. The editorialist denounces and dissects the lies of the President of the United States on all subjects: negation of climate change, absence of inequalities, beneficial effects of tax cuts, etc. According to him, "Trumpism is bellicose ignorance applied to all areas". But he is also extremely harsh on the state of the Republican Party, which he considers to be gangrened by the "Movement conservatism", that is, a collective that includes both Murdoch's media empire and a host of think tanks and pressure groups, funded by conservative billionaires who have taken control of the party.
Throughout the chronicles, we readily see in Paul Krugman a Don Quixote side which tirelessly scraps against the mills of international finance and attacks with vigor the cynicism without limit of the powerful. But in this book, he precedes this fighting posture with an explanation of his way of thinking.
Seeking indeed to "Flush out dishonesty" and considering that in economic analysis, everything has now become political, the essayist announces that he has set himself four writing constraints. The first two touch on the form of his chronicles, but have a heavy impact on the bottom, especially in economics: it is, for him, always " favor simple subjects ” but also of"Use everyday language".
