Credit at the speed of light
(posted by Angelica)
Patrick Nielson Hayden reminds us of newly-minted Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s previous work…on how interest rates work across the universe:
Krugman is famous for his work on the economics of international trade, but as our corporate cousins at Nature remind us, one of his early works was a pioneering examination entitled The Theory of Interstellar Trade:
Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Here’s a Georgist analysis of Star Trek:
http://www.progress.org/archive/fold284.htm
October 15th, 2008 at 1:36 am
JS: That didn’t really strike me as an “analysis.” Of course, that might be because I didn’t finish it. I got bored around the second time he flat-out stated “since everyone seems happy and prosperous on Star Trek, I’ll just assume it’s the end result of the implementation of all my favorite economic theories!”