Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed page and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2008. Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 21 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His latest book is “End This Depression Now!”

I’ve described myself in the past as a lukewarm opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although I don’t share many progressives’ intense dislike for the agreement, I’ve seen it as not so much about trade as about strengthen-ing intellectual property monopolies and corporate clout in dispute settlements — both arguably bad things, even from an efficiency standpoint.

But the White House is telling me that the agreement that officials reached this week is significantly different from the one we were hearing about before — and the angry reaction of industry repre-sentatives and Republican lawmakers seems to confirm that. What I know so far: The pharmaceuticals industry is mad because the extension of property rights in biologics is much shorter than it want-ed; tobacco is mad because it has been carved out of the dispute settlement deal; and Republicans are mad because labor protections turned out to be stronger than they expected. All of these are good devel-opments from my point of view, though I’ll need to do much more homework once the details are clearer.

It’s interesting that what we’re seeing so far is a harsh backlash from conserva-tives against these improvements. I find myself thinking of Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman’s work on the politi-cal economy of free trade agreements (read their paper here: nber.org/papers/w4597), in which the two economists conclude, based on a highly stylized, but nonetheless interesting model of special interest politics, that: “An F.T.A. is most likely to be politically viable exactly when it would be socially harmful.”

The T.P.P. looks better than it did, and that infuriates much of Congress.

Europe Has Learned NothingIf you want to feel despair about Eu-

rope’s prospects, first look at a recent presentation from Peter Praet, the Eu-ropean Central Bank’s chief economist (here: bit.ly/1FV6AzQ), then read a recent Financial Times op-ed by Ludger Schuknecht, the chief economist of the German Finance Ministry (here: on.ft.com/1OTfalF).

Mr. Praet offers a portrait of a Conti-nent crippled by inadequate demand, with a strong deflationary downdraft. Mr. Schuknecht, meanwhile, declares that we need to stop stimulus and reduce debt — in other words, every country should be like Germany and run a huge trade surplus.

If there’s one thing that we surely should have learned from the experience of the past seven years, it’s that adding up really matters. My spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If every nation slashes spending and tries to pay down its debts at the same time, incomes fall and debt problems probably get worse. Europe’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product isn’t rising because it’s spending more than it did during the good years; the eurozone’s overall structural deficit is now very small, much lower than it was in 2005-7. But low growth and infla-tion mean that G.D.P. is going nowhere.

German officials see this all as a tale of their virtue versus everyone else’s lack thereof.

This means that nobody will change course aside from officials at the E.C.B., who are in the process of finding out just how limited monetary policy really is when interest rates are very low and fiscal policy is pulling in the wrong direc-tion.

PAUL KRUGMAN

An Improved Pacific Trade Deal

Politicians and pundits often overlook the negative impacts of these trade deals. Consider the North American Free Trade Agree-ment.

Once that deal was fully imple-mented in the 1990s, it forced small farmers in Mexico to compete against corporate American farms, which devastated local villages and forced millions of poor Mexicans to go to the United States in search of work. Meanwhile, American facto-ries were moved to Mexico.

Unfortunately, the United States

has a long history of cutting trade deals in order to expand the na-tion’s geopolitical influence — at the expense of working Americans. The wealthy, of course, are never negatively affected, or else such agreements would never make it to Congress.

Middle-class Americans need steady work so that they can support their families and save for retire-ment. These are the people our poli-cies should be trying to protect.

Yet these days, the only politician who seems to be looking out for or-

dinary, middle-class Americans is Senator Bernie Sanders.

— TIM KANE, ARIZONA

Mr. Krugman, you consistently refer to America as though it is a single entity, when it obviously is not. There is the America for those who matter: the richest 1 percent, as well as their banks, their media, their politicians and, ultimately, their government. And then there is the America for the rest of us.

So I guess that I will have to de-pend on the analysis of others to

understand what this treaty might mean, although I suspect that it will be a good deal for the 1 percent, and a bad one for workers and the environ-ment.

— R.B., MINNESOTA

The Democrats just lost a voter. I need to find a presidential candi-date who opposes both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Nafta, and who supports universal health care and lowering taxes for the middle class.

So far, the only two candidates

who fit these requirements are Mr. Sanders and Donald Trump.

— J.H., CALIFORNIA

This is a very complex, techni-cal agreement that involves 12 countries, hundreds of different products and many esoteric is-sues, like intellectual property. And the full text of the deal has yet to be released. Of course, this won’t stop people from condemning it.

Basically, the average American either thinks that free trade is gener-ally a good idea — that the econom-ics of comparative advantage are inexorable; and that in an era of globalization, traditional notions of sovereignty have suffered consider-able erosion — or he does not.

As is the case with all such deals, there will be trade-offs that will make some people happier than oth-ers, but it’s the totality of the agree-ment that matters.

Now that the pact has been agreed to, implementation of the pact will be left to experts who were appointed by a competent Democratic admin-istration. There’s no reason to be-lieve they won’t do a reasonable job of looking out for our interests.

— JOHN, CONNECTICUT

READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM

Middle-Class Americans Often Bear the Costs

DEBATING POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND OTHER TIMELY TOPICS WITH PAUL KRUGMAN OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2015

ONLINE: COMMENTS Comments have been edited for clarity and length. For Paul Krugman’s latest thoughts and to join the debate online, visit his blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.

Matt O’Brien at The Washington Post recently recalled Michael Kinsley’s pronouncement five years ago in The Atlantic that in-flation was coming to the United States, and Mr. Kinsley’s doubling down two years later in a Bloom-berg column. Mr. Kinsley, it turns out, remains unrepentant and very annoyed at the people who said that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

It’s really quite sad. Mr. Kins-ley is a very smart guy, who also happens to have given me my big break in journalism back in 1996 by hiring me to write for Slate when he was editor. But now, as a commentator, he’s a prisoner of “derp.”

I’ve seen this phenomenon a number of times, mainly in eco-nomics, but also in other fields like climate science. Somebody with a reputation for cleverness looks at, say, macroeconomics, and imag-ines himself to be smart enough

to weigh in — while not realizing that this is a technical discipline, and that he has no idea what he’s talking about. And for whatever reason, he chooses the wrong side of the argument.

I think Mr. Kinsley was, more than anything else, motivated by

that New Republic/Slate “counterintui-tive” style: “Bernanke and Krugman may act like experts, but I’ll show my cleverness by taking the opposite position.” For some-one like the financial analyst Cliff Asness, the motivation was more likely affinity

fraud: The inflationistas sounded like his sort of people, and he didn’t realize that they were peddling derp.

So what do you do when it be-comes clear that you did, indeed, pick the wrong side? You could admit that you were wrong and re-

vise your worldview, as Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Min-neapolis, did. But such humility is very rare. The great majority of people who find themselves having made an indefensible argu-ment respond as Mr. Kinsley has, by doubling down and trying to defend the indefensible — and by getting angrier and angrier at the people who warned them that they were getting it wrong.

Sad.

Jeb Goes GaltThis, from Think Progress, is

amazing: “ ‘I think the left wants slow growth because that means people are more dependent upon government,’ [Jeb] Bush told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo.”

Remember, Mr. Bush is the Republicans’ establishment can-didate for the presidential nomina-tion — and he thinks he’s living in “Atlas Shrugged.”

PAUL KRUGMAN

Yes, You Can Change Your MindIn an article for The Atlantic pub-

lished in 2010, the political commenta-tor Michael Kinsley predicted that as the United States recovered from re-cession, it could face the prospect of runaway inflation.

In his view, the nation’s expanding level of debt would eventually bring the country to the brink of hyperinfla-tion and create, as Mr. Kinsley put it, “a disaster story on the level of Hurri-cane Katrina, if not 9/11 itself.”

By 2012, as the inflation rate in the United States remained low by histor-ical standards, Mr. Kinsley reiterated in a column for Bloomberg View that “there will be a fierce storm of infla-tion in the next few years.”

Since Mr. Kinsley’s 2012 predic-tion, inflation has declined even far-ther, from 2.6 percent to 0.2 percent this August. In September, Mr. Kins-ley told Matt O’Brien, a commentator at The Washington Post, that while he conceded that inflation had not risen, he cautioned that “many liberals ha[d]

moved on to the view that more infla-tion would actually be a good thing,” an attitude he likened to wanting “po-lio to rebound to a healthier pace.” The notion, he said, “sounds insane.”

Mr. Kinsley’s views stand in stark contrast to those of Narayana Ko-cherlakota, the president of the Fed-eral Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who was also deeply concerned about the threat of inflation in 2011. As one of the Fed’s most prominent “hawks” at the time, Mr. Kocherlakota argued that the central bank should clamp down on its efforts to stimulate the economy because the nation’s unem-ployment was structural in nature, and holding interest rates too low for too long would simply stoke inflation, not create jobs.

However, in 2012 Mr. Kocherlako-ta changed his position in response to new macroeconomic research, and in recent years has forcefully argued that the Fed should do more to raise inflation and stimulate growth.

TIM GRUBER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

BACKSTORY

Inflation Predictions

Defending the indefensible has become the mainstay of Republi-cans. They recently demonstrated this strategy by failing to base their criticisms of Planned Parenthood on facts.

— ROBERT PRENTISS, CALIFORNIA

Mr. Krugman, your assertion that Michael Kinsley is taking the same position as conservatives because he wants to be “coun-terintuitive” is far too kind. The truth is that he has simply become a conservative.

There exists a whole category of people who think like conservatives and have the same opinions as con-servatives, yet are somehow labeled by commnentators as liberals. As far as I can tell, this group exists primarily so that conservatives can point to them and say something like: “See, even the liberal Michael Kinsley agrees.”

It’s a nice trick, really.— NAME WITHHELD, NEW YORK

Irony: an economist pointing out how annoying it is when clever

people with expertise in one field wander into another one and make definitive pronouncements without understanding that they actually lack important expertise in that field.

— CARL V. PHILLIPS, PENNSYLVANIA

The people who tend to respond to mistakes the way that Mr. Kins-ley has are usually public figures.

Admitting that they are wrong would be like admitting that they lack credibility.

— DAVE, WISCONSIN

Mr. Kinsley can get away with “doubling down” because there’s no penalty for doing so, and he has a lot of company. His view is still widely shared among the Very Seri-ous People.

— J.R.D., NEW YORK

Likening “Atlas Shrugged” to an economics textbook is similar to reading “The Three Musketeers” as a historical text.

— RICHARD GREEN, CALIFORNIA

Mr. Krugman, if I agree with

your macroeconomic predictions and you turn out to be right, I get no points for agreeing with you.

But if I stake out a remote position and disagree with experts like you, and my predictions come true, then I look like a genius.

— NAME WITHHELD, NEVADA

Jeb Bush cannot say such things and expect to be elected. It’s as though he’s providing his opponent with fodder to use against him in a general election.

— C. NEYLAND, MISSISSIPPI

READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM

In American Politics, ‘Expertise’ Has Become a Subjective Term

Narayana Kocherlakota is head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES

President Obama meets with business leaders earlier this month in Washington to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership. After years of negotiations, trade officials from the United States and 11 other nations recently agreed to enter the pact.