ABSTRACT
Paul Krugman is one of the two most vocal, inventive, and widely known enfants terribles among the baby-boomer generation of economists. Whereas pop internationalist rhetoric typically asserts that the rate of growth in real wages in the United States has been adversely affected by competition from low-wage countries, Mr. Krugman shows that in fact the slow growth in real wages in the US has occurred "almost entirely for domestic reasons," not international ones. Mr. Krugman also calculates that, were the US to adopt a "strategic trade policy"—a staple of pop internationalist rhetoric—the results would have negligible effects on the US economy, raising it by only l/15th of 1 percent of the US GDP. Mr. Krugman's devastating criticism of the pop internationalists places him in an awkward position because he himself provided the intellectual underpinnings for the pop internationalist views that he dismantles.
