Essentials of Economics

Paul Krugman, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is a faculty member of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, associated with the Luxembourg Income Study, which tracks and analyzes income inequality around the world. Prior to that, he taught at Princeton University for 14 years. He received his Barroom Yale and his PhD from MIT. Before Princeton, he taught at Yale, Stanford, and MIT. He also spent a year on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers in 1982–1983. His research has included pathbreaking work on international trade, economic geography, and currency crises. In 1991, Krugman received the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal. In addition to his teaching and academic research, Krugman writes extensively for nontechnical audiences. He is a regular-ed columnist for the New York Times. His best-selling trade books include End This Depression Now!, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, a history of recent economic troubles and their implications for economic policy, and The Conscience of a Liberal, a study of the political economy of economic inequality and its relationship with political polarization from the Gilded Age to the present. His earlier books, Peddling Prosperity and The Age of Diminished Expectations, have become modern classics.

Robin Wells was a Lecturer and Researcher in Economics at Princeton University. She received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley; she then did postdoctoral work at MIT. She has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), Stanford, and MIT.