Bangers and mash explained

Paul Krugman is an academic economist at Princeton. People like me, though, know him for his regular columns in the New York Times, which often seemed to be the only intelligent and courageous journalism being done on the Bush administration, which had so thoroughly intimidated or hornswaggled most of the press.

Today, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize, and people like me, who don’t know the difference between financial and fiscal, are thrilled. I don’t know how his big economic papers read (I think I heard him call them “incomprehensible” in an interview this afternoon), but he is a fine, deft writer on the op-ed page. As a rough example, I have stolen from Marginal Revolution, where you can read about Krugman’s academic work, this little “economic” essay on why English food was, for so long, so bad—and why it’s so much better now.