Economist Paul Krugman Is a Hard-Core Science Fiction Fan

If you follow the news at all, you’ve probably seen Paul Krugman — Princeton professor, New York Times columnist, and Nobel Prize-winning economist — championing the idea that government spending can lift us out of the economic crisis. What you may not know is that Krugman is also a huge science fiction fan.

“I read [Isaac Asimov’s] Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager,” says Krugman in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, “and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and I said ‘I want to be one of those guys.’ And economics was as close as I could get.”

Krugman isn’t the only economist who’s into science fiction. He also counts Brad DeLong at Berkeley and many of the contributors to the Crooked Timber blog among fans of the genre.

“I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction,” says Krugman. “It’s speculative, we’re thinking about what society could be like.”

Krugman’s involvement in the science fiction world peaked in 2009 when he attended the World Science Fiction convention in Montreal and joined author Charles Stross for a free-wheeling, hour-long discussion.

“The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking,” he says. “It’s great to get to talk to people … I mean, Charlie, of course, more than basically almost anybody on the planet, but people who are really willing to think outside of any box that you can imagine.”

Despite growing up as a shy, nerdy kid, Krugman is now one the most prominent figures in the media landscape, aided in no small part by the rise of the internet and blogs, which are enabling interesting people with specialized knowledge to attract a fanbase like never before. A development, Krugman is quick to point out, that was predicted by science fiction.

“If you read Ender’s Game, his brother and sister actually end up shaping planetary debate through their online aliases, and the debates they have with each other under assumed names,” Krugman says. “So all of this was prefigured, which is why science fiction is good for your ability to think about possibilities.”

Read our complete interview with Paul Krugman below, in which he analyzes the cashless future of Star Trek, talks about his economics paper “The Theory of Interstellar Trade,” [PDF] and evaluates whether or not it makes good business sense to invest in a Death Star. Or listen to the interview in Episode 61 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (link above), which also features a discussion between hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley and guest geek Sarah Brand about economics and corporations in fantasy and science fiction.

WIRED: You’ve said that you recently agreed to write a new introduction to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. What will you be talking about in your introduction?

Paul Krugman: The background story is, I read Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and said “I want to be one of those guys.” And economics was as close as I could get. Those are pretty unique novels — they really are structured nothing like even the great bulk of science fiction, because they are about how social science can be used to save humanity.

WIRED: In recent years you seem to have a very good track record of predicting what’s going to happen. Do you ever feel like in some way you’ve achieved your dream of becoming a psychohistorian?

Krugman: Well, no. I mean, a little bit, fine. But two things. One is, it’s a pretty limited domain. I don’t think I’ve had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried. In economics we do have some … you know, we don’t exactly have the laws of psychohistory, but we do have some pretty good guidelines. The other thing, of course, is in Foundation, Hari Seldon is able to put together his long term plan and actually nudge history in the direction he wants it to go, and so far I’m feeling not like Hari Seldon but like Cassandra. I keep on predicting bad things, no one will believe me, and then they happen.

WIRED: Is science fiction something that a lot of economists are into?

Krugman: I think it’s fairly common. Not everyone, obviously, but social scientists in general … I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction. It’s speculative, we’re thinking about what society could be like. Never mind the gadgets, although they create the alternative worlds, but a lot of it is thinking about society.

WIRED: You also mentioned that you recently re-read Frank Herbert’s Dune. What was it like going back and re-reading books like Dune and Foundation? Are they any different from what you remember?

Krugman: First of all I think I have more appreciation for the craft of writing. You know, when you’re 14 or 15 and you’re reading things like this, you’re enjoying it, but I think there’s an extra depth that comes from having tried to be a writer, even if you’re a writer of — at least allegedly — nonfiction. Things were very different. When I first read Dune, I thought it was great fun. When I re-read it recently, it was, “Wow, there’s a guy who had a vision. This is not just an interesting novel. This is somebody who created a universe for himself that he really, really cared about,” and that shines through in a way that it probably did when I was 14 or 15 when I read it, but I have a deeper appreciation. And re-reading Foundation … again, there’s a lot more craftsmanship in those books than you might think. It was a very young Isaac Asimov, and he wasn’t Tolstoy, but there’s actually a lot more in the way of creating a form of storytelling that now I think I can appreciate in a way I didn’t when I first read it.

WIRED: Back in 2009 you appeared as a guest at the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal. Was that your first science fiction convention?

Krugman: Yeah, it was. And I really went because I thought it would be fun — as it was — to talk with Charlie Stross. That was a really interesting experience, and I may do it again if schedules mesh. The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking, and my usual world is one where, you know, I like to hope that my friends and the people whose work I admire are adventurous thinkers, but we do tend to stick pretty close to the ground on a restricted set of issues, and it’s great to get to talk to people … I mean, Charlie, of course, more than basically almost anybody on the planet, but people who are really willing to think outside of any box that you can imagine.

WIRED: How did you end up doing that? Did you see that Charlie Stross was going to be there, and you got in touch with them? Or did they reach out to you?

Krugman: They reached out to me, because I’ve written about him. I’m actually somewhat involved with the guys at Crooked Timber, which is an interesting blog that’s a mixture of economists and political scientists and philosophers, and actually many of them science fiction fans, and they do book symposia, and some of them knew me and knew that I was a Charlie Stross fan, so I went in, they had a symposium on Charlie Stross, and I think things keyed off from there.

WIRED: So how did you become a Charles Stross fan?

Krugman: I think I probably was just browsing in a bookstore. As I’ve often said, you can shop online and find whatever you’re looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren’t looking for. I think I stumbled across The Family Trade, but then discovered that there’s much more.

WIRED: Yeah, I saw you described those books as “economic fiction worth reading.” What is it about the economics in those books that you thought was interesting?

Krugman: The Family Trade novels involve some people who, for reasons that are not entirely clear, are able to step between alternative histories and move back and forth, and the world they come from is actually one where basically civilization has not done too well, where North America is a collection of medieval kingdoms and pretty backwards. And they of course have access to 21st-century America, so they can bring back this technology and catapult their society into the modern world.

But they don’t. The society is still backwards, with just an elite that has luxuries that they can import from our universe, but they leave both the poverty and the oppressiveness of their society largely unchanged. Which is what really happens, as I said in the stuff I wrote for the Crooked Timber seminar. And Charlie actually makes the analogy. I mean, Saudi royals can go and get their education in the United States or England, and bring their western luxuries, but when all is said and done they’re still feudal lords of a feudal society, and it’s a lot harder to change a society than you might think. So the stories are very much about how just knowing that there’s a technology, knowing that an economy can be run more productively, doesn’t necessarily bring you into the modern world.

WIRED: Those books actually have more of a fantasy flavor than science fiction. Do you read a lot of fantasy as well?

Krugman: There is a genre of fantasy that I am sometimes a sucker for, which is the “novels of prophecy,” where there’s a destiny, and little by little it unfolds, and there are revelations and prophecies, and things gradually fall into place, something like the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time novels, which I’m a sucker for mainly because life is not anything like that. Sometimes I need an escape from what life is really like, which is one damn thing after another. And the great thing about the Foundation novels is he manages to have in many ways the structure of a cycle of prophecy novels, except that the prophecies are not mystical, but because Hari Seldon and the laws of psychohistory tell you what’s going to happen next.

WIRED: I’ve noticed that in your public statements you often make science fiction references. For example, you’ve said that an alien attack would end the recession in 18 months, and you recently said that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has been “assimilated by the Borg.” What kind of reactions do you get to those sorts of references?

Krugman: Well, it’s funny. I mean, we live in a culture where science fiction has gone … when I was a teenager, it was very marginal, and nobody knew about it and serious people didn’t refer to it, but it’s made a lot of inroads into our culture, and “assimilated by the Borg” means, you know, a lot of us understand, that’s a very quick, very powerful metaphor for takeover by a set of institutional norms that you really shouldn’t be taken over by.

Now, the problem, as it turns out, is that I think lots and lots of people know what that means, but “lots and lots of people” did not, as it turned out, include all of the editors of The New York Times Magazine, so I had to include some sentences explaining what that was about. That felt a little funny, but I guess not everybody has quite the same cultural tastes I do. The alien attack thing … there have probably been 700 movies like that — half of them starring Will Smith. Just to give you a notion of “get us to spend on something.” That’s a story people can understand.

WIRED: Back in 1978 you wrote an economics paper called “The Theory of Interstellar Trade.” Can you tell us what that was about?

Krugman: Yeah, so first you have to understand, I was an assistant professor at that point, which actually in retrospect of course is a wonderful thing. It’s a nice job, and the worst that can happen is you end up at the number 20-ranked school by the time you get tenure instead of the number one. But it feels, at the time, you know, you’re in your 20s, and it seems like there’s a steep climb, and you’re having trouble getting anybody to pay attention, and out of frustration I blew off some steam by writing a little piece on interstellar trade.

The joke was, since time of shipment is a big factor — even, actually, in real international trade — and time of shipment would be much longer in interstellar trade, how much time do you spend on shipment, considering we’ve got the theory of relativity, which says that it depends on the observer? So, you know, playing with that. And because I was blowing off steam, I actually did the economics right, so as I said in the introduction, this was a serious treatment of a ridiculous subject, which is the opposite of what we usually do in economics.

There is a joke page — or there used to be — in the Journal of Political Economy, and I sent it to them, and they didn’t get it at all, so I just sat on it. But it circulated in samizdat for several decades, and in 2008 finally some people said, “Hey, can we publish this thing?” So 30 years afterward it actually got into print in the journal Economic Inquiry.

It ended up saying that it actually doesn’t matter how much time elapses on the spaceship, it’s the time that elapses in the frame of reference of the people doing the investing that matters, which is of course obvious if you think about it for a second, but I was able to have some fun, and among other things put in a diagram of Minkowski spacetime, which has an imaginary time axis … which was a blank page, because, after all, it’s just imaginary. So I was having some fun.

WIRED: In the movie Star Trek: First Contact, a character asks Captain Picard how much it cost to build the Enterprise, and he replies, “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity.” What do you think about that?

Krugman: I will say, even with all my science fiction-y stuff, that in economics … it’s not that things never change, but they change much more slowly — the underlying principles change much more slowly — than most people imagine. You can read John Maynard Keynes or Irving Fischer from the 1930s, and except for a few archaic turns of phrase it looks like they’re describing what’s happening right now. My friend — and actually fellow science fiction fan — Brad DeLong at Berkeley, actually says that Walter Bagehot‘s book from the 1870s about financial crises reads better than most of the articles you’ll see in the popular press these days.

It’s true that the laws of economics are really quite different for the 21st century than they were in the 15th century, because we didn’t really have many of the features of a market economy back then. And maybe by the 24th century it’ll be different again, but I’m not so sure about that optimistic view of Captain Picard. One thing I think we see is that greed has a way of breaking through, no matter what we do on other fronts.

WIRED: Well, I think that’s interesting, because I think most people would look at what Captain Picard says there and say that could never happen because of human nature, because people are too greedy, but it makes me wonder, if we were able to genetically engineer people to be more altruistic, would that kind of system work, or are there still benefits to having a currency?

Krugman: A market economy does have some desirable features, even leaving aside the question of greed and all that. In a way it behaves like a computer. If you’re going to make a decision between doing this and doing that, and there are resources, and you’re wondering “How do I evaluate those trade-offs?” And the answer is that market prices make it easy, it’s just one price — how much does this cost versus how much does that cost, and it’s not perfect, but much of the time it’s not a bad way of assessing what the actual trade-offs for society as a whole are.

So you can represent an idealized market economy as the solution to an optimization problem. And on that optimization problem, the Lagrangians are going to tell you they look an awful lot like market prices. I think we’re probably going to have something like a market as far as the eye can see, although actually by the 24th century, since the artificial intelligences will probably be doing everything … I don’t know how they’ll do it, but we don’t need to know because they’ll do it.

Wired: You’ve mentioned that you’re a fan of Iain M. Banks. What do you think about the sort of post-scarcity economy depicted in his Culture series?

Krugman: Well, again, that’s what you’d love to see, and at some level, maybe eventually we can get there. We actually do know that money, that wealth, ceases mattering very much at the margin as people get sufficiently rich. It really is true that beyond a certain point … it’s not that wealth doesn’t matter at all, but that wealth doesn’t make very much difference to people’s welfare, and that other things matter very much more. So you’d like to imagine that we could eventually get to a point where we really are post-scarcity.

But it’s a hard road. John Maynard Keynes wrote an optimistic essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [PDF] in the ’30s where he talked about once the world was four times or eight times as rich as it was when he was writing, at that point we would no longer be concerned about material things and we could get past all of this striving and greed. And actually we are about as much richer as we were supposed to be according to his projection, and somehow the striving and greed is still with us. So it’s a further away goal than we’d like to imagine.

There was a very early Heinlein novel that I ran across once in the library at Yale University — which was written in the ’40s — which was a Keynesian novel. The whole problem was that people wouldn’t spend enough, and so everything about society was designed to keep the spending going. I forget the name of it — it was actually a pretty bad novel — but it was interesting to see him playing with that idea.

WIRED: There’s a company called Planetary Resources that’s planning to do real-life asteroid mining. What do you think about that business model?

Krugman: The first thing I thought when I saw that was, “Aha, and so the evil villain hijacks whatever the system is to move the asteroids into mining position and aims one at earth.” Haven’t we seen that movie many times? It’s one of those things where it’s just like, surely we’ve seen enough dystopian movies like that, that I probably wouldn’t go there just on that basis.

WIRED: Speaking of dystopias, dystopian novels are really popular right now. If you had to imagine a likely scenario for how the US could turn into a completely dystopian society, what would it be?

Krugman: It’s not that hard. I mean, in some ways, when I’m having a bad day, I try to think, “What are the possible routes by which we don’t turn into a dystopian society?” I mean, we’ve got the environmental threat, which I try not to think about too often because I don’t know what to do given the political environment. But that’s huge hanging over us. We are, economically, failing to deal with this crisis we’ve got, and there’s real echoes of the 1930s in a lot of what’s going on politically, mostly in Europe, but there’s some of it here too. And information technology has been so far by and large a force for liberation, but it’s not too hard to see how it could turn into a force for the opposite.

WIRED: In your book The Conscience of a Liberal, you make the point that a middle class society was the result of government policy during the New Deal. And that just makes me wonder, was that just a bizarre accident that the biggest war in the history of the world happened to coincide with the most liberal president in the country’s history, creating this middle class society, and that that’s just going to be a historical accident. And so projecting into the future, things are just going to go back to normal, which is wealthy aristocrats and starving peasants?

Krugman: Well, I don’t think it was totally an accident, because the truth is the same developments took place in a number of places. You know, Britain did the same transformation we did — actually more thoroughgoing than ours even over the same period. And a lot of the rest was at least partially because we as the victors of the war helped spur the reforms, but it wasn’t just an accident. We were certainly lucky in FDR, but it was a pretty likely outcome. But looking forward, it’s quite possible that the long run state, that the natural state, except for special episodes, is one of extreme inequality.

One of the more fun things I wrote was back in 1996, before I was a regular writer for the Times, but I was asked to write something for the Times Magazine. That was the hundredth anniversary of the Times Magazine, and people were supposed to write essays that were written as if looking backwards from the year 2096. It’s funny because very few of the writers were actually willing to do it; they were too serious. But I was, and I wrote of a society where basically not just the middle class was gone but education was devalued and wealth came largely just from owning resources — back to the old days of a resource-based aristocracy.

We still think of that “Ozzie and Harriet society,” or whatever you want to call it, that pretty decent society — obviously with its problems, but pretty decent in terms of the middle class — that we had for a generation after World War II as being somehow the natural end state of modern technology, modern development, and I guess the balance of the evidence says, no, that’s not how it works.

WIRED: There’s been a lot of discussion lately among economists about whether it makes sense to build a Death Star. This debate picked up this year after some Lehigh University students estimated that just the steel for a Death Star would cost $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the current GDP of the Earth. Do you think that a battle station is worth that kind of investment, especially considering that the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force?

Krugman: Yeah, I think that’s probably right, and also, in general, you have to think that the basic trend in military technology — as with everything else — has been towards small and deadly. I think more likely we’re going to have microscopic drones that can kill everybody. So the Death Star is a very antiquated vision of what evil will look like. Evil will come in stylish, Steve Jobs-inspired designs.

WIRED: There was a Newsweek profile of you that quotes your mom as saying, “He was so shy as a child that I’m shocked at the way he turned out.” So how’d you go from being a shy, nerdy kid to being the kind of guy who goes around arguing with powerful people on television?

Krugman: Oh, but that’s really easy, that’s impersonal. It’s an odd thing. Put me in a one-on-one with somebody, and I’m just me and probably still the same as I always was. And it’s also practice, right. The first time I wrote columns, which was many years ago, I was actually a really stiff writer. I had to learn how to do that better. The first time I was on TV I was awful.

WIRED: You had a recent blog post in which you compared your number of Twitter followers to people like Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Sarah Palin. What effect does that kind of social media have on your role as a newspaper columnist?

Krugman: I actually don’t tweet. I have a kind of bot that tweets when I put up a blog post. Blogs turn out to be my sort of thing, but 140 character droplets not. It’s only when there’s something that’s really breaking, when I really want to know what’s happening, I’ll read some news Twitter feed, but aside from that I don’t, so I’m not much into the social media thing.

What it does mean is that I’ve got an audience. What’s happened is that the blogosphere has turned into a really effective means of having rapid fire, real time intellectual discussion, and I guess the social media helps to bring that together, because people are more aware of what’s happening in an even shorter period of time. But I don’t do social media directly myself because I’d be swamped.

WIRED: Does that give you more independence, do you think, because even if The New York Times were to fire you, you would still have this online audience?

Krugman: Well, that’s not what I think of much, but I think the Times is aware of the online audience. That’s the kind of thing that they want to see happening, and they’re even friendlier than they would be otherwise, but … you know, things are happy with me and the Times right now, because I sell papers. And I actually sell digital subscriptions too, and the Times paywall thing is going pretty well, so we’re all happy.

WIRED: Do you have any ideas about how punditry might develop into the future with all this electronic stuff?

Krugman: It’s interesting. It does mean that you don’t have to have the imprimatur of a major media organization, and I’m not sure exactly how major media organizations are going to survive in the long run. I think the Times is doing pretty well at this, but it’s a long, tough haul. So it does mean that anybody who is smart and writes well and is able to react can get into this.

I think we thought for a while that it was going to be very democratizing, and it turns out not to be. It turns out that because people have limited attention and have to make priorities, you end up with what is a very hierarchical system, in which a few people really do garner the great bulk of the attention in any particular area of discussion. So I’m not sure whether it may not even at some level be even more oligarchic, in a peculiar sort of way, than the old system. But it certainly means that there’s more variety of the ways in which somebody can come to have an intellectual role in shaping discussion.

By the way, science fiction prefigured that. If you read Ender’s Game, his brother and sister actually end up shaping planetary debate through their online aliases, and the debates they have with each other under assumed names. So all of this was prefigured, which is why science fiction is good for your ability to think about possibilities.

WIRED: So your new book is called End This Depression Now! What’s that about?

Krugman: Well, look, we’re suffering the greatest economic disaster since the 1930s. An enormous human cost, never mind the dollars. We’ve got 13 million people unemployed, another probably 12 million or so that are involuntarily underemployed, 4 million people who’ve been out of work for more than a year. This is a huge catastrophe, and it doesn’t have to be happening. The basic economics of how to solve this are very clear, and have been confirmed by recent events. There are quite straightforward policies that could bring us out of this very fast, but we’re not doing it, and we’re not doing it partly because no one is making that case clearly and effectively.

I’ve been trying, in the column and in the blog, but those short form arguments have their limits. If I make some point in a column or a blog post, people will say, “Well, but what about this?” or “What about that?” And the answer is, “Well, actually I’ve answered those on a previous occasion.” But it’s just a series of memos. So the book takes all that and puts it together. The arguments about why this doesn’t have to be happening, why the objections to the things that could get us out — which is first and foremost government spending, temporarily, but we need the government spending now, some change in monetary policy, and some work on debt relief. It puts all that together in one place, with some new material also, but presenting that long form argument. There’s still a place for books that make a long form argument in an attempt to move the discussion, to get us to actually, finally, after trying all the alternatives, do the right thing.

WIRED: If people want to keep up with you and other economists online, which websites and blogs should they be following?

Krugman: I read The New York Times, The Financial Times — the Financial Times has a blog, FT Alphaville, which is just for market stuff, but the next stop is a blog called Economist’s View, which is Mark Thoma at the University of Oregon. It’s a personal blog, but he actually gathers material and produces what really amounts to a daily economics magazine, with links to much of the stuff that’s going on out there in the discussion. Brad DeLong at Berkeley has a more personal blog. He was there first; he was an inspiration to me to start doing it, and he’s still a really interesting guy. I read a bunch of others in rotation, but I think basically I start each morning with those, and then I actually usually read a couple of more political blogs: Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent, also at the Washington Post, on more politics, The Washington Monthly. And at that point it’s time to prepare the next class, so I move on from the blogosphere and start putting my lecture notes together.

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