Adam Smith is a best-selling author and for 14 years had a weekly show on PBS called Adam Smith’s Money World that won four Emmys and a Peabody Award.  He’s a very smart guy.  Smith was Tom Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, founded Institutional Investor and New York magazines, and somewhere in there about 25 years ago became a friend of mine.  I try to collect heroes and this guy is definitely one of mine.

Smith lives in Princeton, NJ, next-door to Paul Krugman, Princeton professor, New York Times Op-Ed columnist and oh, by-the-way, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.

I wonder how he invested that money?

On July 8th Smith and Krugman put on a little show for fewer than 100 folks at a meeting in Princeton of New Jersey Common Cause. Someone was there to take bad video of the event which I have here and intend to share with you over three posts today and tomorrow then we can get back to health care.

Krugman is a very smart economist working at the top of his game and explains things pretty well.  In these clips (there are 17 in all) he presents what could easily be the contents of a dozen or more columns.  And what I like is it is presented colloquially with us getting a much better sense of the man than from his very polished work in the Times.

I am not saying Krugman is right about everything, but I think these clips are very worth watching for a sense of our time and current thinking about it.  And it is odd how little it has to do, really, with economics and how much with government and just the way things do and don’t get done in our culture.

I look forward to reading your comments.