Is Krugman the

NO ECONOMIST HAS been more outspoken about the causes and consequences of the “Great Panic” and “Great Recession” than Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman. He is one of a golden generation of economic thinkers, spawned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that have emerged to dominate the debate about the causes and consequences of slump.

Krugman has gained particular prominence and notoriety because he has escaped the elevated world of academia to become the voice of liberal Keynesian economics on the opinion pages of the New York Times. He is also a prolific blogger.

But as time has moved on and the crisis that began in 2007-08 in the American sub-prime mortgage market has stretched into 2012, his prophesies of doom, unless Western governments radically change direction, have started to gain increasing traction.

It has been almost impossible to escape the Krugman view of the world over the past month as he has toured radio and TV stations on both sides of the Atlantic, promoting his populist book End this Depression Now (published by Norton). Krugman has been consistent in his criticism of global political leaders regardless of their stripe.

A critic of George W Bush when he was in the White House, he has been equally scathing about Presi- dent Obama’s tentative responses to ending America’s slow growth and unemployment.

He is one of the few people to have praised former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for his actions in trying to stabilise the financial system in the immediate aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008. In the British political dialogue Brown is the person most often blamed for the boom and bust that has laid growth in the UK low, with output running at more than 4 per cent below where it was in 2007, ahead of the panic.

MIT is the powerhouse of American economic research producing more Nobel prize winners and policymakers than any other leading US university. This is largely due to the leadership of Paul Samuelson, known to many undergraduate students as the author of their standard economic textbook.

Samuelson — himself a Nobel economics prize winner — gravitated to MIT when it became clear to him that he was unlikely to get the support he needed from the university’s Cambridge Massachusetts neighbour,