How can winning a Nobel Prize in economics seem like it’s no big deal? Well, if you’ve already won the John Bates Clark Medal—an honor bestowed biennially on the American economist under 40 who has made major contributions to his profession—you’ve already taken home a piece of hardware considered by many economists to be slightly harder to win than a Nobel. Only 12 people have won both, including Paul Krugman, who collected the 1991 Clark and then snagged the Nobel (and its $1.4 million check) in 2008.

While Krugman’s elite status within the economics profession rests on his groundbreaking theory of international trade and his expertise on a host of international financial crises, his broader national influence comes from the media real estate he occupies on the op-ed page of The New York Times, a column he began writing in 1999.