To Infinity... And Beyond!

Here's an interesting aside, Paul Krugman, an economist and columnist for the New York Times, recently posted on his blog an old thesis he penned when he as an assistant professor at Yale. The title "The Theory of Interstellar Trade." You can find it here.

Here's the abstract:

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

Krugman is, of course, referencing Einsteins special theory of relativity, which describes how time slows down as you approach the speed of light, from a stationary observer's perspective.

Yes I am going to read this. And yes I am going to waste your time with a post on it (after I get back from Spring Break).

What can you learn from that post? Not much. Certainly not anything relevant to what is going on right now in our economy. Thankfully, it is not my intention to educate you about anything timely in this post. Krugman's paper is a concerted appreciation of economic theory (all "publish or perish" arguments aside), as transposed into another interest in the author's life: science.

A paper like this is simply play, and to some extent, that is what this blog is. While I can really only speak for myself, I believe that the authors of this blog spend their time writing because economics and finance truly interests us enough to think and write about in our free time. Of course, a powerful incentive is educating you, but in all honesty, that would have only produced a few posts a month if that were our only motivation.

We hope you develop similar intellectual appreciations, as you learn more in your respective collegiate pursuits. But please don't restrain yourself to any one practice, or academic microcosm. I tip my hat to both the non business/economics majors who read this blog, as well as the business/economics majors who look elsewhere for intellectual stimulation. I personally wish I could have written about when scientists recently mathematically observed the elusive Hawking radiation, as found through a Bose Einstein Condensate (please ask me about any of these things, if you are so interested), or how we recently FINALLY found dark matter. But this blog is not the proper vehicle to express those passions.

So keep reading, and keep learning.