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NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman wrote a paper when he was an assistant professor in 1978 called The Theory of Interstellar Trade. 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 good than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

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Tags for this entry:  economics  physics  paulkrugman 

This entry was published in March 2008.

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