Economist Krugman to leave Princeton for CUNY

When I was a Washington correspondent, I visited Princeton University in New Jersey. Antique college buildings were beautiful like a quiet medieval city in Europe. The campus even has a golf course. A CEO of a financial company, whose son got admitted to Princeton last year, said, “It costs over 70,000 dollars per year if dorm fees are added to the 50,000 dollar tuition. But when I went there, I thought it’s worth it. I wished I could study there, too.”

Princeton University is leading in economics, in particular. The faculty includes Ben Bernanke, a former Fed chairman, Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman, and Gregory Mankiw, the author of a famous economics textbook. In his commencement speech on the campus last year, Bernanke said that “from a financial perspective, the experience (of sending kids to Princeton) was like buying a Cadillac every year and then driving it off a cliff.” His advice was that it is a way to unhappiness to choose a job based not on affection or passion but on money.

The City College of New York in New York was established by Townsend Harris, the first American ambassador to Japan, for free higher education in 1847. It started out with only 143 students and grew into a body with 270,000 students last year. It has 24 campuses in New York City and its nearby regions. It produced 10 Nobel laureates, but it is hard to say that the school has beautiful campuses. They are as practical as government buildings.

Paul Krugman, an economics professor at Princeton who writes a column for the New York Times on a biweekly basis, will move to CUNY in August next year. It may seem strange to Koreans who value the brand name of universities that the 2008 Nobel laureate economist leaves prestigious Princeton for CUNY. Krugman, as a liberal economist who focuses on social equality and income inequality, said he would study income inequality and distribution justice at Luxembourg Income Study Center at CUNY. He is clearly different from some Korean economists who claims liberal but act differently.

Editorial Writer Choi Yeong-hae (yhchoi65@donga.com)