Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness

A dazzling collection of real-time writing and analysis drawn from the Substack of one of the world's most incisive commentators, Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman.

After the 2024 election, the far right seemed poised to take total control of the levers of power in America. But after almost two years of MAGA government, Americans may now hand the House and possibly the Senate over to Democrats. What happened?

The ever-churning news cycle and a maelstrom of hot takes on social media can't explain these events. Paul Krugman can. Since 2025, the Nobel Prize–winning economist has been parsing the present on Substack, using his renowned ability to clearly explain politics and economics. And, increasingly, he's been lauded for his plainspokenness about the dark reality of Donald Trump's second term.

In that time, the American body politic has suffered chaos and destruction on virtually all fronts—political, economic, regulatory, health and safety, military, constitutional, educational and scientific. And performative cruelty and outright corruption have become the norm.

Working closely with his wife and collaborator, Robin Wells, Krugman now reaches more than 600,000 subscribers. Navigating the Chaos collects eighty-nine of his most widely read posts. These essays—a mix of shorter posts and data-packed Sunday "primers"—provide a fundamental understanding of the deep structural sources of the problems we face from "Trump II."

In a simple and approachable style, Krugman addresses issues critically important to voters in the upcoming midterms, the 2028 presidential election, and beyond: inequality, oligarchy, affordability and inflation, healthcare, energy, tariffs and trade, finance and the Federal Reserve, and technology. The posts are published in their original form—what he wrote at the time—in ten sections grouped by subject and then chronologically, each with a fresh introduction from Krugman.

What results is a kind of diary: A real-time chronicle of a sustained attempt to make sense of a world in which historical forces have thrown us into a spiraling madness, with proposals for how we might recover our national sanity and humanity.