Here is what Donald Luskin of the Krugman Truth Squad has to say about his prize ) :
KRUGMAN WINS THE NOBEL PRIZE The Nobel Prize is never posthumous — it is only awarded to living persons. So some great minds such as John Maynard Keynes and Fischer Black never received the prize in Economics. All that has changed. With today’s award to Paul Krugman, the Nobel as gone to an economist who died a decade ago. The person alive to receive the award is merely a public intellectual, a person operating in the same domain as Oprah Winfrey. And even as a public intellectual, the prize is inappropriate, because never before has a scientist operating in the capacity of a public intellectual so abused and debased the science he purports to represent. Krugman’s New York Times column drawing on economics is the equivalent of 2006’s Nobelists in Physics, astronomers Mather and Smoot, doing a column on astrology — and then, in that column, telling lies about astronomy.
But what’s done is done. The only question now is whether Krugman will pay taxes on the prize at the low rates enabled by the Bush tax cuts he has done so much to discredit, or if he will volunteer to pay taxes at higher rates he considers more fair.
Krugman has much to be faulted for, but not his work on international trade. It would be nice if just for once a criticism of Paul Krugman receiving the award would focus on the issue at hand.