The article is really long, but it is effective in explaining Krugman's evolution from an academic economist doing mainly research to a political economist who tries to explain complex economic theories in layman's terms every week in the NYT.
Some interesting parts that stood out to me were:
1) His wife: Krugman and Wells met while she was a post-doc at M.I.T., which already says a lot, and she edits all his columns. They are also co-authors on an undergraduate textbook that is coming out shortly, and sound like a really intelligent, balanced couple. She also sounds awesome.
2) His shift from economics to political economy: it sounds fairly obvious to most people now that economics and politics can be very intrinsically linked, but Krugman seems to have "fallen" into the political track rather than actively switched over.
3) The distinction made between "freshwater" and "saltwater" economists: I have never heard this before, and I wonder if the theorists who make this geographic distinction attribute it to anything other than coincidence. Are there geographic factors that would explain these different schools of thought?
Freshwater economists—who live near lakes, particularly at the University of Chicago, but also in Rochester and Minneapolis—are more likely to insist thatmacroeconomics be based on microeconomic foundations, which is to say that one should study large phenomena like recessions and inflation as functions of the behavior of many perfectly rational individuals.[...] Saltwater economists—who are to be found in coastal areas, especially at M.I.T., Harvard, and Berkeley—are more likely to allow that, at this stage of our understanding, it is excusable to study some macro phenomena without giving a complete account of their causal logic.
