Alan Krueger, the school’s popular, data-driven professor, who had recently returned from a stint in the Treasury Department, sat on the other side and expressed a more skeptical view of the film’s depictions of evil economists. Compared with Krugman’s outrage, recalled Gene Grossman, chairman of the economics department, Krueger’s was “less so.”
Obama’s recent selection of Krueger to head his Council of Economic Advisers is evidence in the eyes of many that the president, who campaigned as a champion for sweeping change, has also adopted an approach of “less so.” And as an unemployment-scarred country prepares to watch Obama deliver his jobs plan to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, the macro-Krugman vs. micro-Krueger divide that once may have seemed like a low-stakes, ivory-tower debate now is anything but.
“I’m not sure that appointing Alan Krueger is meant to be terribly symbolic, though it is,” said Alan Blinder, a colleague in Princeton’s economics department and a former member of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. The message sent by the Krueger pick, Blinder said, is that “realistically the time for a huge macroeconomic program, a stimulus program, is gone now, but the urgency of doing something about employment is not gone. And what Alan represents is trying to think about programs, some small, some very small, some modest-sized, that can do something about that.”
Obama’s choice of Krueger, who declined to comment while awaiting his confirmation by the Senate, was a safe one. He is an economic superstar and recent assistant secretary of the Treasury. His selection has been roundly applauded by the nation’s leading economic minds, including Krugman.
“He’s done excellent work, he’s a really good guy, whom I know pretty well, since we keep getting each other’s mail,” Krugman wrote in an Aug. 29 post on his Times blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Krugman wrote that despite his colleague’s reputation for more quantitative, narrow research, Krueger had big-picture chops and “is pretty salt-water and activist by inclination.”
But as much as Krugman and Krueger have in common — professorships at Princeton, left-of-center politics, genius status in the world of economics — the two economists have marked differences in temperament, campus presence and ideas.
Krueger, 50, is a handsome, fit and able Washington insider. A tennis buddy of past and present Obama economic gurus Larry Summers, Tim F. Geithner and Gene B. Sperling, he also hits with Blinder, who observed with a chuckle of Krugman, a mildly Hobbit-like 58-year-old, “I don’t believe he plays.”
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