Pop Respectability

Pop Internationalism
by Paul Krugman
MIT Press, 1996. 214 pp. $22.50.

Paul Krugman’s Pop Internationalism is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published in Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, and similar journals. It works quite well as a book. Essay by essay, the organization is coherent and the writing is crisp and relentless. Pop Internationalism is an excellent guide to what Paul Krugman believes. It is an even better guide to what he thinks about other people.

For Professor Krugman is on the warpath. He is out for blood. He is after a coterie of public intellectuals, mostly liberals, who believe that the United States has a “competitiveness crisis” and that something should be done about it. This group is not only wrong, in Krugman’s view. They are fools. Worse, they dare to write about international economics, a subject about which, if Krugman is correct, they know absolutely nothing.

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