Paul Krugman Interview Paper

Paper 2 In 2007, Paul Krugman was interviewed by NPR host Robert Seigel. In this interview, Krugman asserts that political development drove and enabled negative economic change. Krugman has an extensive education and is a prolific author on the subject of economics. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics and has worked at the World Bank. Currently, Krugman is an economics columnist for the New York Times and teaches at Princeton University. His education and experiences provide great insight and argument for the points that he espouses within this interview. Some of those points include the United States is entering a New Gilded Age, citizens vote against their own self-interests, and the Republican Party is largely responsible

They cut the island’s trees down to make rollers for their statues. No one can say for sure what caused them to do this until the very last tree was felled. It may have been because of pride, greed, status, or some other unknown reason. The only thing we can say for sure is “the Easter Islanders failed to understand that the conditions necessary for life are finite.” The Islanders elite were only thinking of the short term benefits rather than the long term consequences. We see this in our society today. Our entire ecosystem is at risk because of short sightedness. Rather than benefit the whole over the long term, the wealthy elite make decisions that will benefit them individually over the short term. They build subdivisions for our growing population and clear land for commercial agricultural purposes. Logging and road construction pose additional dangers to our ecosystem. An example of this is a coastal temperate rainforest found on Alaska’s coast. According to greenpeace.org, “roughly 1 million acres of this old-growth forest have been lost to clearcut logging and road construction over the past 50 years.” This has created significant threats to wildlife. Deforestation can also lead to soil erosion, which begins a downward cycle of destruction. Diamond makes the case that soil erosion on Easter Island resulted in landslides which buried buildings and forced the abandonment of agriculture. Population dwindled, starvation ensued, and tensions