View Full Version : Who is the conservative Krugman
Tabby_Cat
07-17-2011, 01:17 AM
Paul Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/), in case you didn't know, is a lefty economist with a pretty interesting blog, including some pretty interesting facts for cites. Who's the conservative equivalent?
This is a GQ question folks. Try to keep the IMHO to a minimum, and snark is not appreciated - I want to see the other side of the coin.
Knorf
07-17-2011, 02:40 AM
As a columnist, I'd suggest Charles Krauthammer, although he's not an economist.
isaiahrobinson
07-17-2011, 06:47 AM
Probably Greg Mankiw, whose blog is here (http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/). He's an influential conservative economist, and him and Krugman get into it quite often, he was very sceptical about the stimulus package for instance. I don't think they like each other.
In terms of political and policy commentary rather than economics Reihan Salam (http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda), Ross Douthat (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/) and David Brooks (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html) are good reads and influential, although they're all relatively moderate, which is not a popular buzzword among the conservative movement as a whole in the current climate.
Dewey Finn
07-17-2011, 11:29 AM
Possibly Gary Becker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker). Also a Nobel Prize-winning economist who formerly wrote a column for Businessweek. He's more on the conservative side.
Exapno Mapcase
07-17-2011, 12:27 PM
Robert Samuelson (http://www.washingtonpost.com/robert-j-samuelson/2011/02/24/ABSZV8O_page.html) is harder to pinpoint ideologically, but he is sometimes referred to as a conservative. His Washington Post columns fall outside of their "right-leaning" and "left-leaning" opinion sections.
Seven Levitt (http://www.freakonomics.com/) of the Freakonomics blog is also hard to explain, but he seems to be mostly libertarian.
I'm assuming the OP meant economic bloggers.
What the .... ?!?!
07-17-2011, 01:23 PM
How about George Will?
I'm not so sure he or any other conservative would be very proud of the title though.
Ambivalid
07-17-2011, 01:36 PM
Steve Moore, of the Wall Street Journal?
Manda JO
07-17-2011, 02:13 PM
Mankiw and Krugman also both have pretty popular Econ 101 textbooks out, so that's another parallel between the two.
This is a bit of bragging on my part, but I have one former student who is an Economics major at Harvard, and Mankiw was the lecturer for his Freshman economics class. His brother is beginning a major in Economics at Princeton this upcoming year: it will be interesting to see if he encounters Krugman, and to hear how they compare.
Thomas Sowell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell)
B.A. in Economics from Harvard.
Masters from Columbia.
Ph.D. from University of Chicago
from the Wikipedia entry:
Sowell has taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman, his mentor.
His own website:
http://www.tsowell.com/
RickJay
07-17-2011, 09:23 PM
Sowell's the first name I thought of when I read the OP; conservative (in the economic sense; it doesn't necessarily map to current U.S. political affiliation at all) and writes books accessible to the general public.
He isn't much of a web designer, though.
My favourite Sowell anecdote; when he was a kid, he met so few white people (Sowell is black, and as a young child lived in pre-Civil-Rights-Act North Carolina, not exactly the msot integrated place ever) that for some time he refused to believe blonde was a real hair colour possessed by actual human beings.
stpauler
07-17-2011, 09:27 PM
Ben Stein. (http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/archive/yourlife/ben-stein/1)
fumster
07-17-2011, 10:58 PM
As a columnist, I'd suggest Charles Krauthammer, although he's not an economist.No he's not, he's a bartender (http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Moe_Szyslak).
Knorf
07-18-2011, 02:42 AM
No he's not, he's a bartender (http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Moe_Szyslak).
Hmmm...except Moe has a more charming personality.
I_Know_Nothing
07-18-2011, 01:03 PM
David Frum. He is Robert Reich's conservative counterpart on APM Marketplace. Has a popular website here (http://www.frumforum.com/)
isaiahrobinson
07-18-2011, 01:17 PM
David Frum. He is Robert Reich's conservative counterpart on APM Marketplace. Has a popular website here (http://www.frumforum.com/)
He's not an economist, and even as a political pundit Frum strays way off the party line. He's basically considered a heretic. He's an interesting read, and despite his blasphemies he is a traditional moderate conservative, but he's not really the guy you want to go to for "the other side of the coin" to liberal pundits.
puddleglum
07-18-2011, 02:12 PM
Mankiw is probably the closest thing all though he is more of a professor than a pundit, Tyler Cowen has similar stature to Krugman amoung bloggers though his conservatism is more idiosyncratic than Krugman's liberalism. Cowen blogs alongside the libertarian Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.
fp2161
07-18-2011, 02:52 PM
If you are talking about a Nobel Prize in Economics with non-keynesian views and a macroeconomics focus, I would suggest Robert E. Lucas, informal head of the new classical economists.
Problem is that most economists have scientific views that do not exactly match with political opinions (eg Lucas is very right wing in terms of how he evaluates the impact of economic policies, but he is quite left wing when it comes to his theories of endogeneous growth...)
isaiahrobinson
07-18-2011, 08:24 PM
Another guy is John Taylor, whose blog is here (http://johnbtaylorsblog.blogspot.com/). He's a conservative economist who has published significant papers in the past and he strongly disagrees with Krugman on a lot of issues. But I'd warn you, if you ask me he's a bit of a hack: he essentially just supports whatever the Republican line is. Here's (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/03/jonathan-chait-on-john-taylor.html) a piece by Jon Chait collecting a bunch of Taylor's positions through history: the bottom line is that he consistently - and I mean consistently, from Reagan to Boehner - supports whatever it is the Republicans are proposing, and lays into whatever it is Democrats or Democratic presidents are proposing. He contends that the 2007-2009 financial crisis was caused by too much "government intervention", he thinks one of the primary solutions is tax cuts for the wealthy, and so on. But he's clearly a clever guy, he's certainly on the polar opposite end of the spectrum to Krugman and he writes a fairly accessible blog, so he fits your criteria.
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