Paul Krugman wins Nobel Prize

Maybe Obama will listen to him now. Full N.Y. Times story here.

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday.

The prize committee cited Mr. Krugman for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.”

Mr. Krugman, 55, is probably more widely known for his Op-Ed columns in which he has been a perpetual thorn in George Bush’s (and now John McCain’s) side. His columns have won him both strong supporters and ardent critics.

The Nobel, however, was awarded for the academic — and less political — research that he conducted primarily before he began writing regularly for The Times. . . .

From Krugman's Op-Ed column at the link:

Mr. Gruber finds that a [health care] plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured. . . .