Reply #3: I remember reading an article in The American Prospect a while ago, and

[Composed Thinker]

the writer, Robert Kuttner, took issue with the claim that Krugman's work was so influential. He said that economic historians and other countries had known what Krugman published for a long time:

This revisionism was explosive. It came to be known as the "new view" of trade. It was, of course, not new to economic historians, to students of industrial policy, or to Japanese, Korean, French, and German mercantilist planners. But it was a highly heretical concept within mainstream American economics. Krugman had to be taken seriously, not just because he was a card-carrying neoclassical prodigy, but because he could demonstrate the proposition more with reference to elegant algebraic models than with industrial and diplomatic history.

http://www.prospect.org/print/V7/28/kuttner-r.html

I'm not really sure how to analyze this. While Krugman is generally on the same political side as the people at TAP (Kuttner, Tyson, Reich, etc), there are personal (and some professional) problems between Kuttner and Krugman.

Whatever the case, Krugman was taken seriously in academia and has been ever since. He's still light years ahead of Luskin in every sense.