Nobel Laureate and NY Times Columnist Paul Krugman to Receive Yale Award

The 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and renowned political columnist and professor of economics Paul Krugman (’74) will return to his alma mater on November 9 to receive The Henry E. Howland Memorial Prize, one of the highest honors that Yale bestows.

While he is here to receive the Howland Prize, Krugman will conduct a town hall-style meeting with Yale students hosted by James Levinsohn, director of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. The town hall meeting will take place on November 9 in Sprague Hall, 470 College Street, at 4 p.m., and is free and open to the public. Admission is first-come, first seated.

Krugman is the author or editor of — at last count — 23 books and several hundred articles, as well as a twice-weekly columnist in the New York Times, a popular and prolific blogger and regular political commentator on a variety of TV news shows. He is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics. He earned his Ph.D. at MIT and taught there, at Yale and at Stanford University before joining the faculty at Princeton. Prior to his academic appointments, he served as senior international economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded for his work in international trade patterns, Krugman has received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to the top economist under the age of 40, and the Asturias Award given by the King of Spain and known as “the European Pulitzer Prize.”

He has been hailed as one of the most influential political opinion makers of our times. The Washington Monthly called him “the most important political columnist in America.” The Economist cited him as “the most celebrated economist of his generation” and the Asia Times recently dubbed him “the Mick Jagger of political/economic punditry.”

The Henry E. Howland Memorial Prize was established in 1915 in honor of Henry Elias Howland, 1854, a well-known lawyer and judge who had served as a member of the Yale Corporation. The prize may be awarded to a “citizen of any country in recognition of some achievement of marked distinction in the field of literature, the fine arts, or the theory of government or politics,” with special consideration to “the idealistic element in the recipient’s work.” The first Howland Memorial Prize was awarded posthumously to poet Rupert Brooke in 1916. Among later Howland Prize recipients are composer Aaron Copland, journalist Sir Alistair Cooke, stateswoman Indira Gandhi and government leader Tony Blair.

The Jackson Institute of Global Affairs is a principal driver of Yale’s efforts to internationalize its teaching curriculum, to attract the most talented students and scholars to Yale from around the world, and to deepen the University’s engagement abroad. Established in April 2009, the Institute administers Yale’s International Relations Master’s program and International Studies undergraduate major. The Jackson Institute also provides career counseling and placement assistance to students wishing to pursue a career in public service and other areas of international affairs.