Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Interstellar Trade

I like this a lot.

"The Theory of Interstellar Trade"
Economic Inquiry, Vol. 48, Issue 4, pp. 1119-1123, October 2010

PAUL R. KRUGMAN, Princeton University - Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

This article 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 traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.


And I'd like to think that most of p-kroog's columns for the NYTimes were likewise satirical. That would explain a great deal.

(Nod to David Z)

1 comment:

jeremy h. said...

It appears that the paper was written over 30 years ago (or perhaps, this is another part of the joke):

http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf