Before the Times, Krugman had been at Slate; he'd had a column in Fortune too, and before that he'd written a book called The Age of Diminished Expectations. Plus, he had a rep for being the Democratic free-trade go-to guy -- if you needed a quote, you called Krugman.

"You've been developing your brand," I say (realizing, too late, that I'm using a discredited boom word).

"My brand," he says, caustically.

I'm not surprised that Krugman resists this -- not many Princeton guys or Times guys are openly comfortable with the black arts of self-promotion and the celebrification process. (I wonder if Greenspan was once media-averse, too?) Krugman also seems to think that when I say media, I mean glamour. He doesn't go to New York or Washington parties, he protests -- or even get invited to them.

Then, too, I'll bet the gloomsters, quite in character, like to think they're on the outside looking in; whereas the boomsters definitely considered themselves the center of the universe.

"You're not talking about anything that is relevant to me," he says.

Clearly, though, I say, the boom was hot -- now the bust is hot. This, not illogically, will give him and other doomers the kind of authority and visibility that the boomers had.

He resists this point -- it's not just ingenuousness, I don't think, but also a kind of commercial contempt.

Possibly it's a kind of academic-class disdain. For a second, I think of the Galbraithian hauteur, but Galbraith was a glamour-puss in his own right; Krugman, I suspect, is a puritan. (He refers to Galbraith, whose shadow falls on all media-active economists, as a people's economist rather than as a professional's economist; Galbraith, in other words, unlike Krugman, couldn't do the math.)

I try again to argue that economics has become a media discipline -- that it's not just the math you have to understand but the nature of the message (which starts to sound like one of those absolutely obvious economic formulations that they give Nobel Prizes for). You represent the message. You become the message. It's all about who's a player.

I absorb his withering annoyance and condescension.

The face of this New Economy (or New New) will be, I can see now, a bit pillish, definitely moralistic, certainly much less fun than the old New Economy.

He tells me how many serious papers he's written and that he's the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, which is, he says, the next best thing to the Nobel. "It's actually scarcer than the Nobel," he amends. Larry Summers, he adds, got it in the next go-round. The boom economy was a hyped economy, he says (which is exactly my point). Whereas he sees himself as anti-hype ("On the other hand, no one really sees himself as pro-hype," I say). So many of the people, he says, who talk about economics for the media are people just interested in the drama -- "up-and-down economics" he calls what they practice. "I don't," he says, "get my jollies out of that."