Paul Krugman: Asimov's Foundation novels grounded my economics

[caraher]

Warning: Krugman's essay is full of spoilers, so don't read it unless you've read Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

[SheilaT]

1. Hmm. I'm a huge fan of science fiction,

an like a lot of what Asimov wrote, but I could never get into his Foundation series.

[caraher]

3. I was just talking about this to an SF fan at work today

He also had trouble warming to the Foundation books upon re-reading them many decades later. In his view, part of it is that Asimov is really at his best in short stories. It's been a few decades since I've read the Foundation series myself, and I suspect the books glow brighter in my memory than they would upon re-reading.

[SheilaT]

4. There are any number of novels from the

"Golden Age" that are crying to be adapted to movies. Asimov's The End of Eternity is one of those. It's an amazing story, and I cannot believe it hasn't been adapted.

[Fumesucker]

2. Krugman is from Trantor; Gingrich ain’t

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013354.html

Far be it from me to discourage mainstream political commentary that’s framed in terms of science fiction, but Ray Smock’s Newt Gingrich the Galactic Historian gets it wrong:

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor, a fictional world created by Isaac Asimov in his classic Foundation series about galactic empire.

Wrong. The Honorable Newt is not from Trantor. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is from Trantor. This is known. He’s said on multiple occasions that he went into economics because the field of psychohistory doesn’t exist. What Krugman took from the Foundation Trilogy was the idea that you could learn everything about history and put it together in order to understand not only what has happened, but why things happen the way they do. Remind you of Gingrich? Me neither.*

Newt’s master plan for America does not come from a Republican Party playbook. It comes from the science fiction that he read in high school. He is playing out, on a national and global scale, dreams he had as a teenager with his nose buried in pulp fiction.

Do not blame that on science fiction. 93% of the people in my social circle read the Foundation Trilogy and assorted pulp SF in their youth, and none of them turned into Newt Gingrich.