That’s sad, and unfortunate. He was really good, and his arguments will be missed.
sheesh, seems everybody that is passing is younger than me anymore.
Yikes!!!
RIP Al
Personalities aside, this is serious loss to the economics profession and economic policy debate. By all accounts Kreuger was widely liked and respected as well as being a strong member of the reality-based research community (with its well-known liberal bias)
You just know the Right Wing is going to accuse Hillary and Bill of murdering him. C’mon, you know it’s true that they will.
I’m 67, and mostly retired. I sometimes wonder if that was a wise choice. Then I read things like this, and think “Yes, wise choice”
Yet the fossilized husband of Andrea Greenspan lingers on.
Hey, no one said life was fair.
Actually, they had to, because he was the real brains behind the Comet Ping-Pong Pizza basement teenage white slavery sex ring. And probably Benghazi, too!
Reality in economics. What a concept! Kinda like anti-matter to the trickle-down theories.
NB: From the NYT Obit writeup (sorry for the longish quote but Krueger was really a standout).
A labor economist by training, Mr. Krueger was part of a new wave of economists who pushed the field toward a more empirical mind-set, with an emphasis on data rather than theory. He applied that approach broadly: to education, health care, labor markets and terrorism, and even to more lighthearted subjects like the rising price of concert tickets. His latest book, due out in June, is on the economics of the music industry.
…Mr. Krueger was perhaps best known for his work with Mr. Katz and another economist, David Card, in the early 1990s on the effects of the minimum wage. Standard economic thinking at the time held that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment for low-wage workers; Mr. Katz said that he and Mr. Krueger had expected to find the same. Instead, they found no impact on employment — a finding that remains in dispute but that has proved influential.
…Mr. Krueger’s more recent work focused on the structural reasons particular groups have struggled in the modern economy. He studied the effects of long-term unemployment in the wake of the recession, and how the opioid epidemic has pushed some workers, particularly men, out of the labor force.
He also helped bring attention to companies’ use of noncompete agreements with employees as a means of holding down wages, and to occupational licensing rules as an obstacle to workers seeking better-paying careers. He proposed new rules to protect workers in the so-called gig economy, and just last week delivered a lecture at Stanford University on proposals for a universal basic income.
— Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley
Despite Krueger’s tragic end (it appears to have been a suicide) if this is where economics is heading then the future looks a bit better than it did before.
As does Henry Kissinger.
They say the good die young…
ick. Kissinger. Even his fossils have fossils.
How so? Suicide?
That’s what I heard on an NPR report.
And suicide is unfortunately getting more common for men of this age whether direct or indirect from drug and alcohol use.
Krugman’s look at Krueger’s work.