Krugman came to Worldcon for two events: a conversation with his favorite living science-fiction author, Charles Stross (which we sadly missed because we were on an airplane) and a one-person talk about science fiction and economics. At the latter, he started out by saying Isaac Asimov's Foundation series inspired his decision to become an economist, since you couldn't actually study to become a psychohistorian. (He's said this many times before, and in fact, said it again in this past weekend's New York Times Book Review.)

But the most surprising part of Krugman's talk was his assertion that the world is actually changing less quickly than in the past. "The pace of change has actually, generation by generation, been slowing down," he claimed. "The world of today is not as different from the world of 1959 as the world of 1959 was from 1909."

So let's say that you travel 30 years into the future and find yourself in a shopping mall. You'll be astounded at the "great gizmos" that are for sale there, but you'll still be able to recognize it as a shopping mall, said Krugman. On the other hand, lots of trends are likely to come to a head over the next few decades, including climate change and peak oil, and they could result in a drastically different world.

Krugman just cleaned out his library and found he had four copies of tons of books published over the last couple decades, since he gets two advance review copies and two copies of the finished book. And he found himself tossing out duplicate copies of tons of futurist books that were depressingly off the mark about predicting the main concern of the 1990s or 2000s. (e.g. war with Japan.) So he's leery of trying to predict the future.

And of course, science fiction was ridiculously over-optimistic about the world of 2009, with talk of space colonization and undersea cities, and yet missed some huge changes which really have happened. "I remember reading something which had all these people flying around between planets, and using slide rules to calculate their next course," said Krugman.

With the start of WorldCon coming this Thursday, we're ramping up to cover our second con in a few weeks. And io9 will be hosting a party with the awesome Cecilia Tan of Circlet Press on Friday night, in a yet-to-be-identified room.

Anticipation 2009 has been putting out tons of info — including a draft list of guests. And in addition to guest of honor Neil Gaiman, Nobel-winning economist Paul "I was right" Krugman will be there, giving a talk about his love of Asimov and holding a conversation with Charles Stross, whose Merchant Princes novels Krugman has waxed admiringly about before.

There's also info about the whopping ten awards that will be given out at this year's Con. The Hugo Awards are always given out at WorldCon, whose members vote on them, but this year you also get to see Cory Doctorow accept his Prometheus award as a libertarian hero for Little Brother, and you get to find out who's Canada's outstanding science fiction author, thanks to the Aurora Awards. And the artist-focused Chesley Awards. Not only that, but there's something called the Golden Duck Award, which sounds rude but is actually for children's SF lit.

Curious to see if the libertarians will play nice with Krugman? You can find out, without making a major commitment.

You can try out WorldCon with a "taster" membership and see if you can handle it in a realtime situation. You can show up and pay 75-95 Canadian dollars for a day membership, then wander around and drink in the sights. Go to a few panels, see if you can get Elizabeth Bear's autograph. Then if you decide that WorldCon isn't for you, you can go back and get refunded all but $20 of your day membership (or $10 for a child's membership).

We'll see you in Montreal! WorldCon "I, Robot" image by Changa Lion on Flickr.

Writing in the New York Times the other day, Robert J. Shiller says that the same kind of understanding of the way people behave seems to have helped journalist Johannes Steel predict World War II in 1934, and Obama aide Lawrence Summers to predict our current economic meltdown in 1989:

Rather than depending exclusively on quantitative analysis, this method relies on a "theory of mind" - defined by cognitive scientists as humans' innate ability, evolved over millions of years, to judge others' changing thinking, their understandings, their intentions, their pretenses. It is a judgment faculty, quite different from our quantitative faculties.

This sounds somewhat less statistically based than the theory of psychohistory, as expounded by Isaac Asimov, but still somewhat similar in terms of trying to predict mass behavior using psychology as well as other factors:

Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along the curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilization and the gap of thirty thousand years that must elapse before a struggling new Empire could emerge from the ruins.

Certainly, Asimov turns out to have been a major influence on one of the current crisis' most prescient forecasters, Princeton economist Paul Krugman. From a recent profile in Newsweek:

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the "Foundation" series-"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism'."

[via Change.org]

As a huge admirer of both Stross and mutant economist Paul Krugman, it's particularly fangasmic to see Krugman analyzing Stross' Merchant Princes novels from an economic standpoint. In the Merchant Princes books, a clan from a medieval world learns to walk between universes and becomes obscenely rich by smuggling drugs where the DEA can't go and bringing back high-tech toys from America. As Krugman notes, this is a common fantasy in science fiction: the idea of bringing first-world technology and standards of living to the third world. Krugman adds:

But what makes Stross’s version different from everyone else’s is that he’s noticed something: the fantasy thought experiment, in which someone brings modern science and technology to a backward society, isn’t a fantasy. It is, instead, something that’s been tried all across the very real Third World, as businessmen and aid workers fanned out across nations in which the typical person, two generations ago, lived no better than a medieval peasant. And you know what? Modernization turns out to be pretty hard to do.

Krugman's post is well worth reading, and so are analyses by fellow Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod and economic commentator Brad DeLong. Actually, the whole Stross seminar is well worth devouring. Check it out. [Crooked Timber]

Krugman's offbeat look at the economics of interstellar trade (which we really meant to blog last week) comes from a paper he wrote 30 years ago when he was "an oppressed assistant professor." It's full of little jokes, like the idea that space explorers may one day "discover or create a world to which economic theory applies." (Unlike Earth, in other words.)

Krugman unveils two pioneering theorems of interstellar trade: 1) The transit time should be calculated according to the clocks on the ground, not the clocks on the ship; and 2) If sentient creatures can hold assets (such as bonds) on two different planets in the same "inertial frame," then competition will equalize the interest rates on the two planets. In a nutshell, for trade to be viable, you have to have common interest rates and a common framework for calculating transit time, so investors can decide whether to under-write a trip, or just stay on Trantor and buy a bond instead.

If we ever do actually colonize other star systems or start trading with other interstellar civilizations, Krugman may get a freighter named after him for his contributions to space economics. [Conscience of a Liberal]