Paul Robin Krugman was born on the 28th of February 1953 in Albany, New York. He spent his early years moving between upstate cities before settling into Merrick, a hamlet in Nassau County, Long Island by age eight.
Paul Krugman read Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels as a child and became fascinated by the fictional science of psychohistory. This literary inspiration drove him to pursue academic excellence at Yale University and eventually determine that economics was the next best thing to real-world science achieving such feats.
Krugman published a seminal 1991 paper titled Increasing Returns and Economic Geography in the Journal of Political Economy. This work linked increasing returns to the geographic concentration of manufacturing and population centers and became his most cited academic paper with over 857 citations by early 2009.
The prize committee awarded Paul Krugman the sole 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography. The award recognized his integration of economies of scale into explicit general equilibrium models explaining patterns of international trade and geographic distribution of economic activity.
Paul Krugman transitioned from academic scholar to influential public intellectual through his New York Times columns spanning from 2000 to December 2024. His writing increasingly focused on political issues including George W. Bush's policy proposals and Donald Trump's administrations regarding climate change and foreign initiatives.