drwex | Meeting famous people changes your opinion of them

Paul Krugman had seemed, to me, to be a somewhat abstract economic thinker. Nice guy, dense textbook, and that was about it.

Having had the chance to hear him talk about himself, his upbringing, and his economic theories at Worldcon I now have a much higher opinion of him and the way he thinks about problems. In many respects he's a geek like me and my friends - he wants to know WHY things are they way they are (*) not just describe situations, and he has a tremendous respect for good research and facts as best they can be found. Like a lot of the geeks I know he's willing to put facts-on-the-ground above ideology. I respect that a lot.

So, now I'm reading his columns more, including this one from the NY Times on the so-called "Swiss Menace": http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=2

(*) at Worldcon he told the story of how he originally wanted to get into history as a field of research but discovered that even though historians are great about the who/what/where/when they tend to shy away from the 'why' and that was what he wanted to do. One might argue that economics isn't very good at figuring out 'why' either, but at least they try.