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GadzodiloJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 12:53pm
I think the article partly mischaracterizes the offer. He is paid to teach and advise students, just not in his first year. The teaching and advising start in the second year and continue afterwards. Having your teaching reduced in the first year of an academic position is not uncommon. This is often done to either help the person acclimate or in lieu of alternative duties such as administration, which is what's happening here. The teaching, once it starts, looks like one course a year, which may actually be standard in Economics at a major research university, though I have no idea. In my field three or four courses a year is common, but in others as little as one is common, especially in those fields in which typically one does a higher amount of advising/mentoring and/or running a laboratory, or in which courses are sometimes highly populated so that teaching one is as much work as teaching several, such as Psychology.

As for the salary, that's pretty high, but may be the normal top end in Economics for someone of his stature, where they presumably also have to best whatever he's getting from Princeton by enough to justify him wanting to leave.

So on balance, while this is a plush offer, it's not out of whack. But it's also something very few people would get offered. As for the irony, well, no comment on that.
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  J.K. TrotterGadzodilo
  4/16/14 1:03pm
  He is paid to teach and advise students, just not in his first year. The teaching and advising start in the second year and continue afterwards.
  
  Right, though it’s not evident how much he’ll actually teach or how many students he’ll be expected to advise. (“The balance of your workload being made up of contributions as described above.”) I repeatedly asked CUNY and Krugman to clarify this, and neither party did.
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  GadzodiloJ.K. Trotter
  4/16/14 1:12pm
  Actually, the parenthetical helps a bit. He's expected to do 4 "units", where a course is a unit, but so is 5 tutorials or dissertation advisings, which usually means individual conference courses with specific students. So if he taught one course and formally advised/tutored 15 students a year, he'd reach his four units. That seems a bit high to me if it were literal one-on-one advising/tutoring, but in some fields (like Psychology) it's common for a professor to run a weekly lab or meeting group of n students where those n students each register for an individual conference course with the professor yet all meet as a group, i.e. it'd be a de facto formal seminar. Each student would count technically as an individual advisee, and that could count towards his units. Plus usually one's units can be reduced contingent on doing other work as well, often as a percentage of your time. So if he really is affiliated with this Luxembourg Income Study Center and is considered, say, 50% there (e.g. 50% of his income is channeled through that unit) then his official units could perhaps be reduced by 50% from 4 to 2 and met by one seminar and, say, advising/tutoring 5 students. Anyway, just working through the possibilities from the available information.
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Shane FerroJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 12:23pm
Find out how much of a pay cut he's taking moving from Princeton and then this will be interesting.
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  J.K. TrotterShane Ferro
  4/16/14 12:35pm
  He did say $225,000 was “remarkably generous,” which suggests a step up. But yeah, I think Princeton would be able to pay more than that.
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  MojiMojiJ.K. Trotter
  4/16/14 1:09pm
  Princeton's Economic Dept. has one of the most generous graduate student stipends (~$25-30k/year) the last time I checked, so I'd be surprised if their top couple of professors weren't pulling in more than a quarter of million per year.
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gerrgJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 8:50pm
Is Krugman at median age?

Is he at median education?

Is he at median intelligence?

Maybe the folks at Gawker are at median age, education and intelligence, and have taken to utilizing their millennial entitlement expectations to determine that they are deserving of equal pay?
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  J.K. Trottergerrg
  4/16/14 9:13pm
  Deep.
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  agnomiegerrg
  4/20/14 5:42pm
  Straw man. The problem isn't even Krugman. It's that rich people (public administrators, government employees) have decided how much they'll be paid with our tax dollars. No sense of perspective, particularly one that takes into account the breadth of lifestyle disparities, enters into the appropriation of public funds. And, sadly, an organization that tasks itself with investigating inequalities has made itself irrelevant by their inability to take the plank out of their own eye.
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Michael Ryan SoileauJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 7:34pm
The main thing that the comment threads teach me is that no one has ever read anything Paul Krugman has written. Ever.

He has no objections to people getting wealthy. Ever. Let's just go ahead and read what he's actually written, rather than strawmen. He doesn't like two things:

1.) Wealth generated for the sake of wealth. This is all of Wall-Street. They produce no goods or services. He's said this numerous times:

'the movie stars. Yes, a handful of media stars make a lot of money. But they are a trivial part of the story (pdf):

The upper tiers of the income distribution are overwhelmingly occupied by executives of one kind or another — corporate, finance, real estate, and lawyers who are surely more corporate than Perry Mason. And even the biggest names in media aren't real players. Remember, the 40 top-paid hedge fund managers and traders made an average of more than $400 million each in 2012.'

So he hates Wall-Street. That's different than hating all rich people.

2.) He hates people who earn their money by offshoring the responsibility of payments onto taxpayers.

He has consistently criticized Wal-Mart, Amazon, and other companies that get rich because the cost of their operations are subsidized by taxpayers. If these companies had to pay for the health care and welfare that their workers get, then their profits would go down by half. And that would cut down their executive pay. And hey, what's that group of people that he hates? (See post 1).

This is a broad range of people: The entire agriculture business (15 billion per year), oil (between 25 to 75 billion), and so forth. The average recipient of this government largesse is already very, very, very rich:

http://theweek.com/article/index/…

So if you claim that it is hypocritical for him to earn money, you are engaging in a strawman argument. People who produce goods and services should be rewarded but if they are earning rentier profits or earning money because taxpayers are shouldering the burden, then they receive unearned wealth.
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  J.K. TrotterMichael Ryan Soileau
  4/16/14 7:46pm
  It’s kind of strange that people are focusing so intently on Krugman. Yes, he’s a well-known economist, a public figure. But it’s pretty clear that CUNY deserves the greater share of scrutiny here.
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trytryagainJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 11:37am
Oh come on, don't be stupid. So many administrators and professors get paid more than this. Is it a lot? Maybe too much for a public institution? Maybe. But he's one of the most prominent liberal academics around, NYC is expensive, and we're talking $200k for what's essentially a one-year engagement. There are plenty of salaries I'm ready to get angry about — this isn't one of them.
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  whatamigonnadowithagunracktrytryagain
  4/16/14 11:41am
  I think it's the irony they're pointing out, here.
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  trytryagainwhatamigonnadowithagunrack
  4/16/14 11:47am
  Let's not get into a thing about what "irony" means, but suffice to say I don't agree it's "ironic" that a man who cares about income inequality is accepting a salary in proportion to what his credentials merit...
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sundalandJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 12:23pm
This is a bit high, but not ridiculously so, for a tenured professor at a major university. Most full professors at top-100 colleges and universities make at least $100,000, and for a Nobel laureate it's probably significantly higher.

Krugman is probably fairly well off at this point, but I doubt he's even close to being as rich as, say, the typical hedge fund manager. And at least Krugman came by his wealth doing something somewhat worthwhile for the human race.
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  J.K. Trottersundaland
  4/16/14 12:35pm
  Right. But CUNY has a distinctly different mission, and a lot less money, than major/top-100 universities.
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  CRChandlersundaland
  4/16/14 1:18pm
  "And at least Krugman came by his wealth doing something somewhat worthwhile for the human race."
  
  And what would that be, exactly? Being an arrogant windbag wrong on virtually everything doesn't seem to be much of a public service.
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heresanideaJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 11:34am
The irony is that Krugman strongly advocates the policy of easy money that significantly contributes to income inequality in this country.
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  America's Wangheresanidea
  4/16/14 11:44am
  Consider me to have bitten...what are you referring to?
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  heresanideaAmerica's Wang
  4/16/14 11:47am
  Krugman has been and continues to be a strong advocate for the Federal Reserve to have "easy monetary" policies. Krugman believes that "money printing" will cause the consumer to buy shit, essentially, whether it be homes, electronics, whatever. The only problem, is that this does not work. This only enriches the wealthiest in the country, because when the Federal Reserve prints money, it does not trickle down. It stays in the top 1%, in high end housing and the stock market. Sure, those prices rise, but that does not help the middle or lower class, it only increases the wealth divide.
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Fleur-de-litJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 11:35am
Does Paul Krugman really need more money?
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  Putin's Pet BearFleur-de-lit
  4/16/14 11:40am
  If he works for it, sure. Is he supposed to do this for free? I mean, even he acknowledges that its way more than he deserves, but I can't really blame him for not turning it down.
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  The Ghost of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ AKA BabyStepsFleur-de-lit
  4/16/14 11:41am
  I'm curious. How much money do you think he has?
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captain_spleenJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 11:45am
Keep your eye on Biddle. He's likely to beat Krugman up for being unacceptably affluent.
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  J.K. Trottercaptain_spleen
  4/16/14 11:49am
  Noted.
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  captain_spleenJ.K. Trotter
  4/16/14 11:51am
  Krugman may well have $1500 eyeglasses. Maybe not Google Glass, but still. It's a fair bet.
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phunkshunJ.K. Trotter
4/16/14 11:47am
Actually it makes perfect sense. If you've been at your job...and excelled at it...for over 35 years, you'd deserve great compensation, no?

And that's not inconsistent with his ideas. He's always advocated good compensation towards people who work. In fact, it's the wage stagnation and poor compensation of the vast majority of American workers that troubles him probably the greatest amount out of anything. He's been very clear about this in his writings.
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  rawrtrombonesoundrawrphunkshun
  4/16/14 11:51am
  they are studying income inequality. in the sense that income inequality is a bad thing. you are an idiot. what do you think the janitors at CUNY make in a fucking year? i bet some of them have excelled at being a janitor for 35 years too.
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  phunkshunrawrtrombonesoundrawr
  4/16/14 12:03pm
  As physical plant staff they're probably in the middle of the pack as far as grade level goes. Probably 35 to start and up from there. After around 20 on the job with contract negotiations and other cost of living increases over that time you'd be looking at around 80 to 90 with full pension if you hit your 40 year mark. You'll also get health coverage if you've been working that long in that job seeing as how you would have been Tier 3, the last of the really sweet packages, which ended in...I want to say..1978. Again, I'm using the state ERS as a guideline, the city has it's own thing.
  
  Anything else?
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