Get Out Thursday: Paul Krugman @ Town Hall

According to his blog, NYTimes Op-Ed columnist and Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman is "sick as a dog" today, right before his visit to Town Hall tomorrow night. Krugman, like Bill Greider at Rolling Stone in the Reagan years, has taken up columnistic arms against the flow of disinformation from the White House. Who will tell the people? Krugman, that's who. (Actually Greider will too.)

Sick or not, Krugman will be at Town Hall to discuss things related to his book The Conscience of a Liberal, and no doubt field some questions about the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, here in the homeland of Washington Mutual, by volume the nation's sixth-largest home-mortgage lender. Krugman's thesis, says a reviewer, is our economic situation (disappearing middle class, et al) isn't really about economics:

...Krugman the anti-economist does not believe that growing economic inequality incubated modern political conservatism. In his view, the “arrow of causation” points the other way: political change, cunningly engineered by “radicals of the right,” has spawned egregious economic disparity, as well as a toxic level of partisanship. Ever the iconoclast, Krugman says “this strongly suggests that institutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income -- and that the impersonal market forces matter less -- than Economics 101 might lead you to believe.” In short, it’s the politics, stupid.

7:30pm Thursday // upstairs, Town Hall // $5 at the door