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His professional peers in the economics community find him increasingly uncredible as he rants about income inequality being the result of deliberate political action to advantage the rich at the expense of the poor. Dartmouth's Andrew Samwick:

I'll forgive him the odd switches between real wages and real wages in manufacturing, as well as the comparisons of wages for one group with income for another group. I'll even agree with him about his (later) discussions of where Republican Eisenhower and Democrat Clinton fit in their respective eras. I'll even forgive him the seemingly obvious point that in the "New Gilded Age," the income gains do seem to be at the high end, refuting his critique of Paulson's first point (under the very reasonable assumption that the top 1 percent is on average "highly educated.")

What always puzzles me about Paul Krugman and his claims about inequality is why he doesn't seem to realize how silly he sounds when he refuses to acknowledge, and take some pride in the fact, that he is part of that top 1 percent. I find it hard to imagine that Paul Krugman's income in 2004 wasn't above $277,000, between his income from his university, his speaking engagements, his books, his columns, and his investments.

Now, does Paul Krugman think that he was just a tool of the "New Gilded Age" politicos? Does he owe his income gains to the people he despises, those nasty Republicans and that ridiculously centrist Clinton? I'd like to know. I suspect that if you asked him why his income grew to the point where he's in the top 1 percent, he would give some long answer, the shorter version of which is that he's "highly educated" and he's not lazy.

Harvard's Greg Mankiw:

Paul is correct when he says that income inequality has been rising over the past three decades (although he overstates the stagnation for the middle class by relying on numbers that exclude fringe benefits--see this previous post). But I agree with Andrew that Paul is on shaky ground when trying to explain rising income inequality by politics (as opposed to technology, demography, and so on). Policy choices such as tax rates and minimum wages have not been the main causes of increasing inequality. At least that is the consensus, as I understand it, of the professional labor economists who study the issue.

And even Berkeley's Brad DeLong:

The problem that I have with Paul Krugman's argument here is that the shifts in income inequality seem to me to be too big to be associated with anything the government does or did. Yes, Roosevelt and company were pushing in the right direction. Yes, Reagan, Gingrich, Bush, and company have been pushing in the wrong direction. But what they did and do affects (I think) after-tax income inequality much more than the before-tax income inequality numbers, and the before-tax numbers show the trends remarkably strongly. And I can't see the mechanism by which changes in government policies bring about such huge swings in pre-tax income distribution.

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