Peddling Prosperity by Paul Krugman

After he won his nobel, I thought it’d be good to read some of his books. Fortunately, Tyler Cowen was discussing Krugman’s books and ranking them relative to each other. Peddling Prosperity was his favorite, so I checked it out of the library.

Krugman does a good job of laying out the examples clearly, illustrating what academic economists thought about the big proposals from each side (basically, that both Supply Side and Strategic Trade are exaggerations or misconceptions from non-economists that filled politician’s needs).

Along the way, he provides a lot of clear description of economic thought and application. The review the 70s and 80s data from several different perspectives and testing against several different frameworks did a great job of explaining where the errors crept in– and helped correct some residual misconceptions I still had.

The book is engaging written– I look forward to reading several more.