To those people wondering about the influence of politics on Krugman's prize: (1) Krugman won the John Bates Clark Medal for economics in 1991. This is a Priz

To those people wondering about the influence of politics on Krugman's prize: (1) Krugman won the John Bates Clark Medal for economics in 1991. This is a Prize given every two years to an American Economist under 40. It's often considered harder to win than the economics Nobel, and is a significant predictor of who actually will win the Nobel. Note that this was largely before Krugman got involved in politics, and past winners include Milton Friedman. I doubt his politics helped him win this one. (2) By most measures of citation impact, Krugman is one of the world's leading economists. E.g., http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.nbcites.html http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.nbcites.html Citations are, of course, an imperfect predictor of the significance of someone's work, this is just an additional data point. I doubt his involvement in US politics had much impact on the prize.