Paul Krugman, 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.
As a columnist, I’d suggest Charles Krauthammer, although he’s not an economist.
Probably Greg Mankiw, whose blog is here. 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, Ross Douthat and David Brooks 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.
Possibly Gary Becker. Also a Nobel Prize-winning economist who formerly wrote a column for Businessweek. He’s more on the conservative side.
Robert Samuelson 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 of the Freakonomics blog is also hard to explain, but he seems to be mostly libertarian.
I’m assuming the OP meant economic bloggers.
How about George Will?
I’m not so sure he or any other conservative would be very proud of the title though.
Steve Moore, of the Wall Street Journal?
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
B.A. in Economics from Harvard.
Masters from Columbia.
Ph.D. from University of Chicago
from the Wikipedia entry:
His own website:
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.
No he’s not, he’s a bartender.
Hmmm…except Moe has a more charming personality.
David Frum. He is Robert Reich’s conservative counterpart on APM Marketplace. Has a popular website here
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.
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.
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…)
Another guy is John Taylor, whose blog is here. 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 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.