2024-12-17
16 分钟This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion.
You've heard the news.
Here's what to make of it.
Let's just get this over with.
I want to get in the pool.
I'm Paul Krugman, just retired as a New York Times columnist, wrote my final column,
and these are some reflections on 25 years at the New York Times.
There's a lot of things I wrote that I'm proud of,
but I think what I'm proud of most is that I took some unpopular and certainly contrarian positions.
So I like to think that while I've staked out a lot of positions and sometimes been willing to stick my neck out,
that I've always done it based on evidence that I tried to share with the readers.
I was brought on at the beginning of 2000, and it's really difficult, I think,
for certainly for younger people to capture the state of mind that we had, which was incredibly optimistic.
I was literally told, we have lots of people writing about the Middle east, but that's not that interesting.
And let's have somebody write about the economy because there was all this fun,
interesting stuff happening in the economy.
Some of it looked silly, but that's okay.
And it turned out that the Middle east was a little bit more interesting than anyone kind of imagined at the time.
But in general, people in America were very optimistic about the future.
Clear majority of people thought the country was headed in the right direction.