How I Work

Krugman's short essay about his own methodology — the four "Krugman rules" for doing serious work in a fuzzy field. Listen to the Gentiles (take seriously ideas outside your discipline), question the question, dare to be silly with your models, simplify aggressively. The piece is framed around economic theory but reads as a manifesto for how to think well in any field where you cannot run controlled experiments — which is most of product direction. Krugman writes with unusual clarity about the relationship between simplicity and rigour: the point of a simple model is not that it is true but that it is honest about what it claims. Short, unpolished, closer to a talk than a paper, and more useful for it.