The article is a brief personal tribute by Paul Krugman to Bill Nordhaus, highlighting his mentorship and economic contributions. While it offers some insight into Nordhaus's influence on Krugman's intellectual development, the text lacks the depth, detailed examples, or broader reflective essay form preferred. It does not extensively discuss mechanisms, creative agency, or include substantial analysis, so it provides some lived experience but falls short of the more detailed, insightful essays favored in the preference rule. The prose is clear and personal but the piece's brevity and nondescript style result in a neutral alignment with the reader's interests.
How this was scored
- Rule
- María’s reading compass · v2
- Provider / model
- openai / gpt-4.1-mini
- Scored
- 2026-11-04T11:31:08+00:00
- Source text
- Revision 431 · full
- Text selection
- All available text
- Prompt / schema
- reader-1 / reaction-1
- Feedback used
- 0 examples from your reactions and notes
- Tokens in / out
- 1194 / 180
- Estimated cost
- $0.000766
- Run
- #12
Exact rule used
This is an editable starter reading profile inferred from my existing subscriptions and a set of articles shared with me. Treat the examples as exploratory positive signals, not as confirmed favorite articles or evidence that I agree with their arguments.
Prioritize thoughtful essays about agency and how people build a life: learning, feedback loops, creative work, finding one's craft, relationships, friendship, conversation, and attention. Look for specific lived experience that develops into an interesting, useful idea. Make room for literary criticism, art, design, history, institutional analysis, and substantial book reviews.
Also consider AI, technology, startups, product strategy, and venture investing, reflecting my subscription mix. Favor explanations of mechanisms, concrete examples, original reporting or analysis, and arguments that acknowledge uncertainty. A piece should offer more than a headline, a trend summary, or a promotional pitch. Do not infer my political views or endorsement from the sources I follow.
Reward clear, distinctive prose and real intellectual substance. Both reflective personal writing and technically detailed analysis can fit. Length is fine when it earns its space. As an initial hypothesis, downrank repetitive advice, vague inspiration, generic hot takes, and hype unsupported by evidence. These style preferences are provisional and can be corrected with my feedback. Evaluate English and Spanish writing on substance without preferring one language.
When explaining a prediction, identify the specific connection to these themes and any mismatch. Do not give a high score solely because an author appears in my subscriptions or examples. Evaluate only the supplied article text; a title or paywall preview is not proof of the full argument.
Reference titles (sample signals; not actual ratings):
- For a long time, nothing. Then, suddenly one has the right eyes.
- Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
- How to walk through walls
- Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
- half the world's writing should remain unpublished
- We think better when our minds are entwined
- The Hacking Will Continue While Market Morale Improves
- the delight of specificity
- Why we ended up homeschooling
- Bangers from Gibbon
- searching for your life's work is a multi-turn endeavor
- Why I Changed My Mind About AI Risk
- The hyperlocal
- The Specter Of Neuralese
- Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs
- Agentic fragments
- Average moments of a long-term meditator
- a case for sharing your dreams with friends
- the best conversations help you hear yourself
- First we shape our feedback loops; then they shape us
- timing
Exact article input
RIP Bill Nordhaus
A giant of economics and my first great mentor
Paul Krugman
Oct 31, 2026
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Oh, my.
Bill Nordhaus
has died. He was a great economist, an inspiring teacher, a wonderful academic citizen — and my first mentor. As an undergrad I took a seminar taught by Bill and Tjalling Koopmans on the economics of exhaustible resources. Bill liked my term paper well enough to hire me as a research assistant on his classic 1973 paper “
The Allocation of Energy Resources
.” Here’s the front page of that paper; see the note at the bottom;
Bill taught me how to be an economist, how to puzzle out a complex real issue and try to frame a model to make sense of that issue. He also showed me that economics can and should be a mission as well as a job. I’ll write more about his contribution and what it was like to work with him soon, probably after the midterms, when I have time to do it right.
2,337
267
209
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Input metadata
{"authors":"Paul Krugman","availability":"full","canonical_url":"https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/rip-bill-nordhaus","publication":"Paul Krugman","publication_id":32,"published_at":"2026-10-31T18:52:18+00:00","subtitle":"A giant of economics and my first great mentor","title":"RIP Bill Nordhaus"}