Well, not really.
We run in much different circles, and Paul Krugman is intellectually light-years beyond me. However, we seem to share some common interests. Did I mention that I took two economics classes in college? A lot of the music he posts as a coda to his newsletter is my type music. And now I discover that he reads science fiction, and has an ambivalent position on reading it. I only slightly blush when I confess that my guilty pleasure is reading pulp detective and science fiction novels. Krugman’s comment on this predilection at an economic conference in Europe was, “And the answer is, well, I don’t know if I’m ashamed or not, but I do read science fiction.”
He then went on give a brief synopsis of one my favorite novels of any genre, Dune:
“But the premise of the novel is that there’s this planet, Arrakis, which is the sole source of something called spice, which is essential to the galactic economy. And so everything relies upon it. And so basically Arrakis is the Strait of Hormuz with giant sandworms. It is really very much relevant to current issues. By the way, the struggle for control of the spice leads initially to weaponized interdependence and eventually to outright war, which is kind of where we want to probably end today’s talk.”
Followed by a quote by one of the characters in the novel Paul Atreides:
“He who can destroy a thing, controls the thing.”
I will confess that I did not read the whole talk as it is very long. The parts relating to Dune are only a few paragraphs into transcript.
But having said that, here is a link to the transcript of his talk at the conference: Economic Size and Economic Power