Economics: One of the many, many things to damn the editorial management of the New York Times for is their continued inability to figure out that stuffing anybody into 600 words twice a week is a recipe for knee-jerk prejudice and bias mongering, rather than for bringing information, knowledge, and analysis to the table in order to help your readers understand and act in the world.

Krugman coped with these hobbles orders of magnitude better than his peers. Looking back from today, what share of Tom Friedman columns have a true and useful insight?

True, Paul had an absolute advantage turning out 600-word fishwrap: hence his repeated and successful accomplishments, over and over again, as an intellectual P. Horatius Cocles. But his massive comparative advantage is and he would have been far more useful at the 2000-word sweet spot: some facts, a relevant economic model, and analysis that teaches you something new, important, and true about the world.

Now that we have Prometheus Unbound himself on SubStack, I expect great—or, perhaps I should say—greater things":

Paul Krugman: The Fraudulence of “Waste, Fraud and Abuse”: ‘History repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second as clown show…. Now that I have written my last column <nytimes.com/2024/12/09/…> for the New York Times, this newsletter is coming out of dormancy. It will be mostly economics-related, and I’ll try to stay away from pure political punditry, although everything — including this post — is political these days. This newsletter will be a lot wonkier than my Times column, and usually wonkier than my old Times newsletter. Definitely snarkier than either…. Short form thoughts will be appearing here <bsky.app/profile/pkrugm…>. And with that, let’s get going… <paulkrugman.substack.co…> (ref.: Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1842. Lays of Ancient Rome. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans. <gutenberg.org/files/847…>).