# Who is the conservative Krugman **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 17, 2011, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328 "2011-07-17T06:17:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Tabby\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Tabby\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tabby_Cat)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/1 "2011-07-17T06:17:42Z")
[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. ---
**Author:** ![Knorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/58956e/32.png) [@Knorf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knorf)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 7:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/2 "2011-07-17T07:40:40Z")
As a columnist, I’d suggest Charles Krauthammer, although he’s not an economist. ---
**Author:** ![isaiahrobinson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/85e7bf/32.png) [@isaiahrobinson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/isaiahrobinson)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 11:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/3 "2011-07-17T11:47:55Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/4 "2011-07-17T16:29:25Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/5 "2011-07-17T17:27:30Z")
[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. ---
**Author:** ![What\_the](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f4b2a3/32.png) [@What\_the](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_the)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/6 "2011-07-17T18:23:47Z")
How about George Will? I’m not so sure he or any other conservative would be very proud of the title though. ---
**Author:** ![Ambivalid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/7 "2011-07-17T18:36:10Z")
Steve Moore, of the Wall Street Journal? ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/8 "2011-07-17T19:13:23Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/9 "2011-07-17T21:19:12Z")
[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/](http://www.tsowell.com/) ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/10 "2011-07-18T02:23:35Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![stpauler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9d8465/32.png) [@stpauler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stpauler)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/11 "2011-07-18T02:27:31Z")
[Ben Stein.](http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/archive/yourlife/ben-stein/1) ---
**Author:** ![fumster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9c0ed/32.png) [@fumster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fumster)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/12 "2011-07-18T03:58:40Z")
> [@Knorf](#): > > 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). ---
**Author:** ![Knorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/58956e/32.png) [@Knorf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knorf)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 7:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/13 "2011-07-18T07:42:55Z")
> [@sh1bu1](#): > > No he’s not, he’s a [bartender](http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Moe_Szyslak). Hmmm…except Moe has a more charming personality. ---
**Author:** ![I\_Know\_Nothing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/f04885/32.png) [@I\_Know\_Nothing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Know_Nothing)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/14 "2011-07-18T18:03:17Z")
David Frum. He is Robert Reich’s conservative counterpart on APM Marketplace. Has a popular website [here](http://www.frumforum.com/) ---
**Author:** ![isaiahrobinson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/85e7bf/32.png) [@isaiahrobinson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/isaiahrobinson)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/15 "2011-07-18T18:17:35Z")
> [@I\_Know\_Nothing](#): > > 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. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/16 "2011-07-18T19:12:20Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![fp2161](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a87d85/32.png) [@fp2161](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fp2161)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/17 "2011-07-18T19:52:12Z")
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…) ---
**Author:** ![isaiahrobinson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/85e7bf/32.png) [@isaiahrobinson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/isaiahrobinson)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2011, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-conservative-krugman/589328/18 "2011-07-19T01:24:08Z")
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.