> Who is William Proxmire anyway? He has an interesting wikipedia page. I can't for the life of me figure out why his campaign paid Krugman for this paper. P

> Who is William Proxmire anyway? He has an interesting wikipedia page. I can't for the life of me figure out why his campaign paid Krugman for this paper. Perhaps he gave the campaign (and it's anti-space-exploration platform) something they weren't expecting, and they had paid in advance. :-) More likely it was Krugman making a joke. There are several others in the paper. Krugman's paper is interesting in arguing whose clock should be used for the calculation of compound interest and makes the perfectly reasonable argument that if a common frame of reference between the planet-bound sender and receiver is avaialble, that should be used, otherwise the receiver's (and certainly not a relativistically moving transport vessel). There's really not that much physics in it, which he cheerfully admits. He also argues that the interest rates of the trading parties would equalize with trade. Again, perfectly plausible (and, it turns out, in the intervening decades that has essentially happened on Earth). He does have a relativistic take on this, though, doing roughly a Lorentz transform on interest rates. Maybe it partially anticipated the investment into low-latency/high-frequency trading that has been popular recently?