Question: Who are you?

Paul Krugman: Oh boy.  I’m a New York suburbanite.  For me, Long Island is the old country.  I don’t think that shapes me so much except that, you know, a kid growing up reading books, learning about stuff.  I mean it    . . .  I guess you could say I come from the . . . the . . . one of the heartlands of the great middle class, post-war boom.  It was . . .  I wasn’t actually in Levittown, but not far from it.  That’s one of the themes of the book, is the way that we had this great middle class boom that encompassed so many people.