Economist Paul Krugman says Boston's 'Jenga tower' economy teeters on Harvard

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and former New York Times columnist, joins WBUR's Morning Edition. In a recent newsletter, he argued that if Harvard crumbles under pressure from the Trump administration, the rest of Greater Boston's economy could crumble with it.

An attack on Harvard puts all of Boston's economy in jeopardy.

"I think it would be equally destabilizing if the administration went after MIT or after  five smaller but still really great schools. It's the signal it sends.

"The thing about Boston is — to use a corporate-ish term — it's a lot of synergy. All of the institutions really rely on each other. Pull out a big piece of it, like Harvard, and the whole thing is likely to collapse."

These are long-term impacts.

"We're essentially talking permanent. This is not about just loss of jobs and loss of some employment. We're talking about all of the positive feedback that this great concentration of intellectual firepower and research creates ...

"The Boston tech complex, it's much more than the sum of its parts. Pull out any one of those parts—and Harvard is a big one of those parts—and you're really risking undermining a key part of the place."

Boston's loss could be another state's (or country's) gain.

"Mostly it's net loss, but maybe, sooner or later, somebody will find a way to create an additional tech complex, though it might be years away. But who's to say it's going to be in the United States? ... Maybe the next one will be in Europe. Maybe it'll be in China. You're taking one of the crown jewels of the U.S. economy and very much threatening to destroy it."