Paul Krugman's Big Game

Sports, like almost all competitive games, are often about heartbreak and irony.

Take yesterday's football contests: the Redskins, supposedly the hottest team in the game right now, got beaten by the St. Louis Rams who hadn't won a game until Washington came to town. Then there's the Atlanta Falcons who ousted the Chicago Bears in the very last second of regulation play-a comeback made even more ironic by the fact that the winning field goal was needed in that final moment, because the kicker, Jason Elam, had missed one not a minute earlier.

And, in perhaps the most ironic of starts and finishes, the perpetually woeful Arizona Cardinals beat the perpetually excellent Dallas Cowboys by both starting the game with a kickoff return for a score and finishing it by blocking an overtime punt for another touchdown—the first time that's ever happened.

Speaking about this, Tom Jackson, ESPN's stalwart football analyst, brought up the even more ironic fact that the Dallas Cowboys, with thirteen returning pro-bowlers, are considered the best-player-by-player-team in football. "But something," said Jackson, "something had them distracted."

What could that something be? Well, the worst bank failure and market tumble in the history of the world might have played a part. It's hard to say for sure, but the most ironic thing to happen in the last few days may not have come from the game of football, rather another contact sport altogether: economics.

This morning, US economist, Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Now, for those who say that economics is not a game, well, I give you short sellers and free markets for one.

I mention this because the irony here is what's truly heartbreaking. Krugman has spent the past eight years warning Americans, and anyone else who's been listening, that the liberal market economy theories that have been dominating his sport for so long would have disastrous consequences.

Those chickens have finally come home to roost and it's safe to say that just about the only person in America who has come out this mess a winner is Krugman, not that he feels that way.

"I never thought I would see anything that looked like 1931 in my lifetime," Krugman told reporters, "but in many ways this crisis does."

And that's an irony far more heartbreaking than a last second touchdown, that much for sure.