Teen Paul Krugman "Found Himself" in Science Fiction

by Clay Burell · 2009-03-30 07:04:00 UTC
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I love hearing what great adults say was the formative literature of their youth. Nobel Prize-winning economist and NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman tells his story in a great profile article on Newsweek:

Born of poor Russian-immigrant stock, raised in a small suburban house on middle-class Long Island, Krugman, 56, has never pretended to be in the cool crowd. Taunted in school as a nerd, he came home one day with a bloody nose—but told his parents to stay out of it, he would take care of himself. "He was so shy as a child that I'm shocked at the way he turned out," says his mother, Anita. Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the "Foundation" series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism'."

His Yale was "not George Bush's Yale," he says—no boola-boola, no frats or secret societies, rather "drinking coffee in the Economics Department lounge." Social science, he says, offered the promise of what he dreamed of in science fiction—"the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems. Sometimes there really are simple solutions: you really can have a grand idea."

I admire Krugman's style on the bobblehead Sunday morning talk shows, the way he pwns sniffly George Will's whacked analyses so effortlessly, and holds Obama's and Geithner's feet to the fire as well. I admire him more now, knowing that he was nerdy, shy, and bullied as a kid.

And what does this say about our insistence on teaching the canonized classics in our English classes? Did they work for you? What did you read voluntarily as a teen? Reading Krugman's account made me remember my strange love affair with a weird fantasy series called The Chronicles of Gor. They weren't classics, but they kept me reading for 27 volumes. That's a hell of a booster for any kid's vocabulary, I have no doubt.

Call me crazy, but at 16, love him though I do now, I just wasn't into Billy Shakespeare.

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Clay Burell
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