The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.

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 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. His popular commentary has attracted considerable comment both positive and negative.