A paper on interstellar trade, three decades old. By Paul Krugman, back before he went nuts.
[Via occasional commenter Jane Bernstein]
4 thoughts on “And Now For Something Completely Different”
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A paper on interstellar trade, three decades old. By Paul Krugman, back before he went nuts.
[Via occasional commenter Jane Bernstein]
Comments are closed.
I’m not all the way through it yet, but I really like:
These complications make the theory of interstellar trade appear at first quite alien to our usual trade models; presumably it seems equally human to alien trade theorists.
As a space and economics geek, that’s classic.
Actually, I’m curious 1) if this is true, because I haven’t the foggiest idea if this is just a joke and 2) whether, if interest rates are calculated according to the common reference frame of the destination and origin and not the travelling craft, whether that biases trade is some fashion due to asset depreciation obviously being calculated according to the travelling reference frame, which is shorter.
Hmmmm, and you say this was before he went nuts?
First of all, it would unlikely that Earth would be sending any ships to Trantor, It’s a backwater
world not unlike Tatooine in the era of the first
Galactic Empire. Second, of all, did he factor the
cost of fuel (H#, anti-matter) into the trade goods. Third, of all, this is what passes for academic scholarship