Rating: 
Summary: Politics based economics based on faulty conclusions
Review: "Paul Krugman has been proclaimed the most celebrated economist of his generation..." proclaims the back cover add. Celebrated by who? Maybe the former economic minister of the Soviet Union. Kruger's attacks on supply-side economics, and general good-for-business economic policies reveal a guy who might be an accomplished academic but has absolutely no common sense. Despite the 80 years of failure data that communist/socialist economic models provide a wealth of information on, we still have people that cling to these ideals. Like blind rats who cannot desert the sinking hulk of failure that centralization and management stupidity that is socialism, they cast about wildly, squeeking to the other blind rats. It is a small book, which was a relief
Rating:
Summary: Politics based economics based on faulty conclusions
Review: "Paul Krugman has been proclaimed the most celebrated economist of his generation..." proclaims the back cover add. Celebrated by who? Maybe the former economic minister of the Soviet Union. Kruger's attacks on supply-side economics, and general good-for-business economic policies reveal a guy who might be an accomplished academic but has absolutely no common sense. Despite the 80 years of failure data that communist/socialist economic models provide a wealth of information on, we still have people that cling to these ideals. Like blind rats who cannot desert the sinking hulk of failure that centralization and management stupidity that is socialism, they cast about wildly, squeeking to the other blind rats. It is a small book, which was a relief
Rating: 
Summary: Master hot dogs and buns to cornering the currency market
Review: Enjoyable economics. The federal reserve is making more sense. Just when you thought you understood technology and the industrial era - along comes Mr. Krugman with a hot diggity dog story. As he describes other issues in economics, we begin to learn about the corning of some financial currency markets AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Finishing up with a spat how the concept of Knowledge Economy is a farce and we actuall capitalize on our celibrity status. Mr. Paul Krugman has a great time with his essays and so will anyone reading them - funny yet educational. Everything you wanted business school to be.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but don't expect too much of it
Review: I understand the disappointment of that reader in Chicago expecting Krugman to be another Feynmann. I am glad he is not. Feynmann was certainly a great storyteller, but usually he (or someone else) wrote popular books about his LIFE, not exactly about physics. Krugman is writing about economics, and not exactly about his life. And that is quite different. I also understand Brian Dewey when he says he doesn't have "a better understanding of economic fundamentals" after reading Krugman's book. Certainly this book is useful to make people aware of the good (and sometimes bad) things economics theory has to offer (especially to debunk myths), and to motivate further reading on the subject. Unfortunately, there is no other way to learn economics-indeed, any other analytical subject-than the hard way. And if you are motivated to learn what REAL economics is about, you should get an introductory textbook.
Rating: 
Summary: A dismal start, an excellent end
Review: I'm an aspiring economist; my first economics teacher referred this book to me as good summer reading material. I had a hard time reading the first half of the book; it felt like I was listening to someone running his or her fingernails on a blackboard. Mr. Krugman's comes across a bit to strident and fails to make it interesting reading for someone curious about economics. To his credit, starting with the articles in Part 4: Delusions of Growth, Mr. Krugman changes his tack and manages to captivate the reader with increasingly more interesting and relevant material. The last article, Looking Backward, is a masterpiece that is very provocative and deserves being revisited and thought about many times over.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book, super fast delivery
Review: I've studied religion most of my life; since religion matters to almost everyone, almost everyone has an opinion about it, and I've seen first-hand that most popular opinions are poorly informed, at best. So I am prepared to believe that the same can be true of other intellectual fields. Like religion, economics matters to most people, and most of us don't know much about it. But I wanted to begin to understand economics, and one of my brilliant friends (a Yale guy who does math for a hedge fund) told me that this book was the place to start. His recommendation should mean more to you than mine! He was right. I now have some basic ideas about things like monetary policy (why what the Fed does matters), currency speculation, supply-side economics, and labor markets. Of course there is a lot more to economics; this book is only a beginning. But it is readable, and well-explained. Let me recommend reading the tutorials at Investopedia.com as well. They were helpful to me. Now I'm at least not a total financial ignoramus, and I look forward to exploring economics more!
Rating: 
Summary: Pop Economics
Review: In the introduction to 'The Accidental Theorist', Paul Krugman states his ambition to do for Economics what Carl Sagan has done to Astronomy - to serve it to the intelligent public without the specialized vocabulary and the math - to popularize economics. In so far as this book is intelligent, enlightening, and most of all - fun, Krugman has hit home run. This is a book of essays, most published in Slate, but also including various speeches and pieces for other markets, such as the New York Times Magazine. In most of them, Krugman discusses the fallacies of prominent 'Accidental Theorists' - people who get economics wrong, either through ignorance of and contempt to economics - like the 'hero' of the title essay, Rolling Stone reporter William Greider who apparently thinks that economics is "not really a science so much as a value laden form of prophecy" even though he doesn't know the first thing about it (p.23) - or, for those who should know better, because they are blinded by their political agenda - like Conservative house leader and professor of economics Richard Armery, whose manipulation of data Krugman exposes (pp. 58-59). Krugman is celebrated as an independent scholar, deconstructing fallacies both from the left and from the right. Even though Krugman attacks leftists wrongs (as in the aforementioned 'accidental theorist' and in a series of attacks on the dismal economic policies of socialist France), it is clear where his heart is. Krugman is a free market Liberal, who supports active governments, both for the definition of property rights ('Taxes and Traffic Jams' pp.173-178), and for helping the poor, including funding Medicare by increasing taxation (pp. 189-190). Krugman also attacks Supply Side Economics (in a whole section of the book titles 'Right Wing Wrongs'), and argues that inequality in American is not, for the most part, the fault of the poor (p. 54). I basically share almost all of Krugman's views, and Krugman takes care to separate his ideology from his analysis, but he is not the unbiased source he sometimes appears to be (but then again, who is?). The greatest in the arsenal of weapons in Krugman's war against economic fallacies is his command of prose. Krugman tackles difficult subject with the immense clarity and wit, and the pure joy of reading it would make this book interesting even for those who are well acquainted with economics. The weakest aspects lie not in these essays themselves, but in the editing. Krugman essentially collected the essays, arranged them according to themes, and wrote introductions to each theme. The book suffers from several weaknesses which could have been avoided with a little more care. First, there is a complete lack of scholarly apparatus that will let the reader track Krugman's facts and statements. The book has neither footnotes nor a bibliography, and there's not even an index. Second, these essays were written in the middle 1990s, during the height of the Clinton years. They constantly refer to then current affairs. But what was the here and now in 1997 is now then and there, and the memory of events will not become fresher as the first Bush administration comes to an end. More background information about the situation when Krugman has written would have made this much easier to get into. Finally, Krugman misses the opportunity to update us on what has happened since he has written these essays. Several people criticized here, such as historian David Hackett Fischer, must have reacted to Krugman's and similar criticisms, but if they did, their voice here is silent. Nor does Krugman bother to tell us how he feels the realities (such as the European Monetary Union or the troubles in Latin America) measure up to his predictions about them. It feels like a lost opportunity - Krugman could have reconsidered these essays, instead of merely republishing them. Faults aside, Paul Krugman's book may just be the best written book about economics I've ever read. His prose and insights are well worth your time and money.
Rating:
Summary: PK cheered me up while all around was gloom
Review: It's 1999 and March. I'm in hospital with a very serious thrombosis in my right thigh. A friend turns up and gives me PK's latest - with a cheery smile. This'll cheer you up, Sunshine. This might be the last book I read and you bring me economics???? Fortunately, he was right. I laughed a lot and cried at the foolishness of the carpet-baggers. I'd read a lot of PK's reviews in Slate before and it was lovely to have access to the best of them, here in a single cover. They range from rants on trade issues to a medley of observations on the Asian Financial Crisis. His piece entitled Bahtulism will remain a classic for years....just for the title. For me, what makes Krugman really great is not whether he's right or wrong, it's the fact that he can articulate his views quite beautifully and still explain where they are derived from. Many of academic peers are either good at being lurid pontificators (Hanke) or dry academics (Meltzer). Krugman is somewhere in the middle, except his economics is the witty, scarcastic kind. Imagine how good he'd be if he converted to the Gold Bug camp. Loonies with an articulate spokesman. Now that would be something special. Since I'm still alive and I laughed through most of the bad times in theatre, I'll have to give PK the five stars he's due.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant and thought provoking
Review: Not many books on the economy is as enjoyable as this little book. It is a confirmation that Professor Krugman is one of the most lucid and persuasive writers of contemporary issues in economics. I have read all his books and I think this one's the most enjoyable, because 1) the individual pieces are shorter(more readable to the laymen like moi), yet contain more insights 2) it contains fewer "personal" attacks on other economists (too many of these make a book tiring to read - a trap which his 'Pop Internationalism' fell into) and 3) the issues are extremely contemporary yet timeless. Many of the articles were originally published on Slate, the fee-based online magazine. I'm thinking of subscribing to it after reading this book. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Krugman is always fun to read
Review: Paul Krugman knows how to make economics interesting and he does it without dumbing down the material. He is deservedly well known for his ability to illustrate economic phenomena using creative and easily understood models. Of course you won't be worthy of a BA in economics after reading this, but you will be able to experience some of the complexities with which the field concerns itself. Some of his essays in this book tackle more complicated issues than others, but all of them are insightful and are a great opportunity for laypeople to find out how economists think about economic scenarios. And, as a bonus, Krugman's writing is rarely boring.
| 
