Bush critic Krugman wins Nobel prize

"A funny thing happened to me this morning ..." is all economist Paul Krugman says on his New York Times blog, Conscience of a Liberal.

Click the headline and a new page shows a medal - the Nobel Prize for economics.

Krugman, 55, a Princeton professor and a Times op-ed columnist, was awarded the prize for a theory that provides new answers to such questions as "What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization?"?

So the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote in its announcement of the award, worth about $1.4 million.

Krugman teaches economics and international affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, and writes two weekly columns for the Times, many of which have appeared in newspapers nationwide, including the Philadelphia Inquirer.

By phone he told a Stockholm news conference that his research was related to the current global economic crisis.

"This is terrifying," he said.

He's well-known as a strong opponent of Bush administration policies that have led to higher deficits while widening the gap between the rich and the rest of American society.

Of his 2007 book, The Conscience of a Liberal, Publisher's Weekly wrote: "Conservative initiatives to cut taxes for the rich, dismantle social programs and demolish unions, he argues, have led to sharply rising inequality, with the incomes of the wealthiest soaring while those of most workers stagnate."

He has lamented how his economic analysis has often generated partisan fervor.

"The most distressing thing I find right now," he said in a 2005 video bio for the Times, "is that everything is political, including the truth. There just is no nonpolitical truth."

Almost any statement "immediately becomes a shouting match," he said. "... These days I find myself saying that 2 plus 2 really does equal 4, and being called an extreme leftist for saying so. And it's a sad thing."

The award won't alter how his research or writing, he said to reporters in Stockholm today.

"The prize will enhance visibility, but I hope it does not lead me into going to a lot of purely celebratory events, aside from the Nobel presentation itself."

Not one of the original five set up by Alfred Nobel's will, the economics prize was set up by Sweden's central bank in 1968.