A Radical Proposal

I see no reason why you'd want to take this disagreement to the level of being insulting. I ignored the previous "idiocy" comment, but you're obviously lacking basic manners.

 

The hell with you, cheapskate. You could at least spare a lousy quarter or a cigarette butt.

 

I think the fact that Krugman writes as much about politics as economics, now, means Pope wins this argument.

 

The man was charging $20,000 for a one-hour speech before he started writing the NYT column and he had authored books that were general enough and popular enough to have been published in paperback as well as hardcover in the 1990s. If you think he lacked influence before the NYT saved him from the streets, it's only because you weren't paying attention.

 

Lean Dean might not mind. :

 

Oh, poppycock.

The man himself realizes that shaping perception via an op-ed can do a lot more good than eleventy billion economics position papers ever could. No one doubts he had narrow influence, before. A column at the NYT gave him broader influence, and that still matters.

But if you want to compare sales figures from, say, "Geography and Trade" and "The Conscience of a Liberal," I'll eagerly await the results of your research.

 

Within the power elite, Krugman had influence, lots of it, before his column. The column made him more. But if that column was only published in a print Times and not available over the Internet, his influence would not decline one bit. The power elite are old guys who read newspapers. It's about the only thing I have in common with them.

 

Book sales and Web hits and radio ratings aren't a measure of influence. They are a measure of popularity. Influence is measured by people in power taking your ideas seriously and acting on them. People who can ante up 20 grand to have you speak at a lunch. People who have immediate access to the president. People who are the president. He had all that well before he started writing for the NYT.