I mentioned in my post on Paul Krugman Monday that Greg Mankiw had told me years ago that he thought Krugman was a lock to win the Nobel one of these days. Greg said on his blog that he didn’t remember that, but it that sounded like something he would have said.

Well, it turns out my friend and former colleague Peronet Despeignes had a long and interesting conversation with Mankiw in 2005, just after Mankiw returned to Harvard after his stint as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. And you betcha, the subject of Krugman and the Nobel came up. The Q&A was posted on Fortune’s website, but Fortune’s website was subsumed not long after that into CNNMoney and virtually all Web-only content–including the weekly London Calling columns I wrote when I was Fortune’s Europe editor in 2000 and 2001–was wiped out. Have I ever mentioned that big media companies have at times been incredibly stupid about the Internet?



Anyway, Perry did hold onto a copy of the Q&A. Here’s an excerpt: