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Interesting. Krugman has said that he got interested in economics because it was the closest thing in reality to psychohistory as described in Asimov's Foundati
by aswanson 12y ago
Interesting. Krugman has said that he got interested in economics because it was the closest thing in reality to psychohistory as described in Asimov's Foundation series. Of course, any society capable of interstellar trade would be beyond scarcity and hence economics as we know it. But fun, nonetheless.
- caretcaret 12y agoYou say that, but go back a few hundred years and you can make an analogous statement about worldwide trade. Yet, our consumption of resources have increased to meet the level of production, and scarcity still exists.
- aswanson 12y agoYou have to get a grasp on the scale of the cosmos to understand what I mean. To get to the nearest star system, alpha centauri, you would need a matter/antimatter reactor that would turn approximately 10 kilograms of mass into pure energy to approach .8c, where c is the speed of light ( and the assumption here is that we acheive near 100 percent efficiency in our propulsion mechanism, which is impossible). Any society capbable of doing so would be far beyond celestial scavenging for a few trinkets, in the same manner that our global economy is beyond scavenging for artifacts from brazilian tribal rituals, historical curiousity notwithstanding.