Krugman next in line for Pulitzer?

Now that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has won a Nobel Prize in economics, David Warsh of Economicprinicipals.com wonders when he will win a Pulitzer for his commentary.

Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein won a Pulitzer this year for commentary.

Warsh writes, “Paul Samuelson last week told Catherine Rampell of the Times, ‘I praise today’s prize as being deserving and even overdue, but more than that I reproach the Pulitzer committee, which owed him at least a couple of prizes in the past. Paul Krugman is the only columnist in the United States who has had it right on almost every count since the beginning.’

“True enough, as far as it goes. But in journalism, as in economics, being right is not all that counts. Intellectual honesty requires something more complicated than that: a systematic marshalling, of not just your own arguments, but the arguments of those with whom you disagree, all the arguments, not just some. The Nobel prize attests that Krugman met that test with flying colors in his work on trade.

“But then formal methods in economics are designed to lead in that direction. The goal in news is something far more provisional than proof. Still, professional standards of fairness require that take your opponents’ views into account and state them as clearly as possible along with your own, even within the limits of a 750-word column, or a series of columns over time. It’s not just what you say, but the way that you say it.”

Read more here.