Paul Krugman Has a Blog

For the last seven years, Paul Krugman has been the only voice in the New York Times to be a consistent and articulate voice for reason.  His critics are fond of calling him “shrill,” but he’s anything but — one of the things that I admire him for is his ability to remain calm and sensible and still confront outrages against common sense and democracy without compromise.  Now, in the same week that the Times has finally axed their accursed “Times Select” pay wall, they’ve given Krugman a blog where he can expand on the ideas in his columns and interact with his readers.  Put it on your feed. Now.

“I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.”That’s the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of inequality.

I’ve given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog posts – although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues, from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns; I’ll be using this space to present the kind of information I can’t provide on the printed page – especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.