I'd like to send this letter by restaurant cash One was articulated by Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize laureate and New York Times columnist who was at the American Economic Association meeting. Krugman accepted the idea that economists share a wide body of agreed, objective and nonideological knowledge. But he argued that when it comes to one subset of issues – business-cycle macroeconomics, or how policy should respond to booms and busts – economists are both divided and biased. That matters, Krugman rightly pointed out, because outside the academy these are among the economic issues ordinary mortals care about, and fight about, the most.