The Great Unraveling; Losing Our Way in the New Century

New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. First edition. Third printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Slight soiling to front dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. xxix, [1], 426, [6] pages. Index. Signed by the author (Paul Krugman) on the title page in 2003. Tear at inside back cover. From Wikipedia: "Paul Robin Krugman (born February 28, 1953) is an American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, Distinguished Scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. According to the prize Committee, the prize was given for Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic concentration of wealth, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services. Krugman is known for his work on international economics (including trade theory, economic geography, and international finance), liquidity traps, and currency crises." The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century is a book by American economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, consisting of a collection of his columns for The New York Times (and some for Slate and Fortune). The collected columns were concerned mainly with the U.S. economy in the early 2000s, and about the economic and foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration. The book was a bestseller, and was 3rd on the New York Times Best Seller list for the week of October 5, 2003, and remained on the best seller list for eight weeks. It was listed as one of the 'notable books' of 2003 by The New York Times. Taken as a whole, the columns were a scathing criticism of the Bush administration, and the Republican party at that time. Krugman argued that the large deficits during that time were generated by the Bush administration as a result of decreasing taxes on the rich, increasing public spending, and fighting the Iraq War. Krugman wrote that these policies were unsustainable in the long run and would eventually generate a major economic crisis. Derived from a Publishers Weekly review: This selection of three years of New York Times op-eds by economist and Princeton professor Krugman document his opposition to the governance of George W. Bush and his "bad economics wrapped in the flag." In his introduction, Krugman asserts that Bush is a radical and that America's right wing is "... a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system." The core of the book's 100-plus columns is dedicated to criticizing Bush's fiscal policies, uncovering the administration's hidden agendas, as well as castigating the media for letting him get away with it. A number of articles advocate the globalization of free trade .Reading the items together reveals Krugman's growing anger at the hubris he sees exhibited by the right wing and its seeming defiance of logic. At first, Krugman is a numbers man, methodically parsing the data, but over time he arrives at the conclusion that "Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy" and "it works a lot like a special-interest lobby." Krugman is one of the few commentators able to sound both appalled and reasonable at the same time as he provides an alternate history of the last three years to that penned by conservative observers.