The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf]

princeton.edu

132 pointsdirtyaura57 comments

I believe cstross's book Neptune's Brood is based on ideas from this paper.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-she...

Which is funny, considering older Krugman's a fan of Stross's other book series The Merchant Princes, which also tries to have a solid economic backbone.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/more-science-fic...

Krugman and Stross seem to be fellow travelers.

1. Neptune's Brood is more heavily based on David Graeber's work on Debt (notably Debt: The First 5000 years).

1a. If you feel inclined to read Neptune's Brood, I've got one big regret: I wrote it circa 2010-11, before BitCoin really took off in the public eye, and used the term "bitcoin" for a not-like-our-BtC-honest cryptocurrency. (If I'd known BtC was going to take off that way the year the book came out, I'd have come up with a different name.)

2. Paul Krugman is a cool person to go drinking with in a pub :)

Hi Charlie,

I enjoyed the book a lot, and I was only a bit irked by the slightly-off Bitcoin references and the countersigning etc.

I have a few pages written on the same idea of many disparate colonies but with the twist that quantum entanglement allows for limited FTL communications, which makes an interstellar blockchain feasible.

I'm looking forward to your next book.

The next book ("The Rhesus Chart") came out last July; there are five books in various stages of production after that ... and none of them deal with cryptocurrency or space colonization or the singularity: this decade I'm doing urban fantasy (plus my big fat post-Edward Snowden security state near-future technothriller).

I'm struggling to remember the novel, but there was another book where some aliens created an antimatter-generating system around a star, using the dip in the star's brightness to tell if another civilization was tapping it.

One of their N-removed feudal client races would then come and conquer your primitive society, unless you managed to decode the rest of their message and further demonstrate you were advanced enough to operate your own government across relativistic distances and timespans.

The premise sounds like Count To A Trillion by John C. Wright.

Of which I loved the idea, but was very disappointed by the realization.

That's it, thanks.

This is by Paul Krugman??!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman

That this is written by a Nobel Prize winner and NYT columnist definitely makes it a bit more noteworthy.

You clearly never read his blog; dude is the biggest sci-fi dork and continuously plugs Charlie Stross. :)

I think it makes it less noteworthy.

Among Krugman's other "accomplishments" is this quote:

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

Are you honestly going to drop a quote from the 100th anniversary of Time magazine in which the authors were instructed to speculate about the world in 2098 as some sort of referendum on Krugman's economic knowledge?

Cherry picking a random sentence from a variety magazine isn't quite as strong of an argument as people keep insisting.

You're right. I am absolutely not making the argument that Krugman is bad because of the quote. I'm asserting that Krugman is bad, because I know that to be true, without offering proof, which would be outside the scope of an HN comment.

Separately, I'm also adding the quote to make fun of him.

I didn't expect people to take my comment as some sort of intellectual argument. As you point out, obviously, it is not.

And another Krugmanism, in the early 2000's: "To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."

this guy has been on the wrong side of history so often I have no idea why anyone listens to him.

I'm not sure why I feel compelled to defend Krugman again, but this specific argument is so incredibly tired and completely disingenuous. Krugman in the early 2000's was as far away from the seat of power as humanly possible, he had 0 impact on policy in the Bush administration.

Just look at how the quotes are represented on HN:

    "To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring
    household spending to offset moribund business 
    investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a 
    housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."

Compared to what was actually said:

    "The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a 
    typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-
    fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a 
    snapback in housing and consumer spending when the
    Fed brings rates back down again.

    This was a prewar-style recession, a morning-after
    brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this
    recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs
    soaring household spending to offset moribund business
    investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put
    it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to 
    replace the Nasdaq bubble."

He went on to describe why he thinks Greenspan will try to create a housing bubble:

    Bear in mind also that government officials have a stake in
    accentuating the positive. The administration needs a
    recovery because, with deficits exploding, the only way it
    can justify that tax cut is by pretending that it was just what
    the economy needed. Mr. Greenspan needs one to avoid 
    awkward questions about his own role in creating the
    stock market bubble.

I'm at a loss how someone can read "Greenspan will create a housing bubble because he's in bed with the administration and they need to justify the huge tax cuts that haven't stimulated the economy and distract from the Fed's role in the stock bubble" and then think that was a policy recommendation and not a prescient critique of a bumbling economic policy.

> to fight this recession, as OTHER GUY put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

it's clear that Krugman is talking about someone else (Paul McCully)'s phrasing of some advice. What isn't clear is whether Krugman also thinks this advice is a good idea. It seems that way from my reading it - unless Krugman thinks ending the ression is not desirable. It's anything but clear, though.

"your interpretation is incorrect" is a reasonable opinion. "I don't see how anyone could interpret it that way" sounds like hyperbole.

A formal language used on social networks could solve problems like this. A record of accurate predictions made in a formal language could be a solid source of reputation.

https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop

The difference really just lies in whether you think that a prediction of an outcome somehow is an endorsement of that outcome.

I think the Patriots are going to win the Superbowl, but frankly I don't care if they do or not.

The entire context of the Krugman article was the administration's insistence that the tax cuts were stimulative and were bringing the economy back. He rightly predicted that in an effort to aid that narrative (since Greenspan had given them political cover), the Fed would keep rates low for longer than was healthy. He also rightly predicted that these actions would lead to a housing bubble.

It's a huge leap to go from reading these predictions to assuming that Krugman supported that outcome. He talks specifically about how this isn't a normal inflation-driven recession that can be fixed with Fed action, which just gives greater evidence to his lack of support for a housing bubble.

Add to that, other contemporary articles where Krugman loudly warns of an impending housing bubble / burst, and it's clear what he thought of Greenspan's actions. From Aug. 2005[1], an article that drew a loud critique:

    Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has become deeply dependent
    on the housing bubble. The economic recovery since 2001 has
    been disappointing in many ways, but it wouldn't have
    happened at all without soaring spending on residential 
    construction, plus a surge in consumer spending largely based
    on mortgage refinancing. Did I mention that the personal
    savings rate has fallen to zero?

    Now we're starting to hear a hissing sound, as the air begins to
    leak out of the bubble. And everyone - not just those who own
    Zoned real estate - should be worried.

You don't need a reputation engine, just some critical eye and enough context.

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html

Krugman's response in a letter to Business Insider. Business Insider was asking him about that quote and about his recent commentary on Bitcoin.

Well, two things.

First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.

But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.

And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that they don't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary economics. -- Krugman, Business Insider Letter [http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-inte...]

I read that before I posted the quote. I think it's worth reading, so I'm glad you posted it.

I'm not trying to prove Krugman is bad with the quote; I simply added it because I find it amusing.

His excuse says: "I was writing in print about something I'm not an expert in, and I wasn't being serious anyway." Fine. That is how I would interpret things even without the excuse. It still says something about Krugman, but no, the quote is not overly damning by itself. (Krugman's entire body of non-academic work, on the other hand....)

How can you understand and write about economics if you get something as fundamentally change-provoking as technology wrong?

While politicians who like to defer responsibility to economists would want their electorate to believe otherwise, economists are not soothsayers. They are familiar with some ideal models for modeling economic systems of a few variables that may or may not hold up depending on the actual market conditions.

Economic forecasts are a bit like really bad weather forecasts - given a few variables and that nothing changes they may hold up.

But they cannot predict what will change and what effects it will have. Like the long term implications of internet.

For small systems with stable technologies like markets for a limited set of products some macroeconomic rules may hold up pretty well. But for large scale economies the economic decisions are as much political as fiscal, and the soundness of the decisions can be found out only in retrospect...

That's an opinion he learned from Stross, ironically.

Krugman loves science fiction. He said that he wanted to stydy psycohistory described in the Foundation series, but chose economics because it was the closest thing you can actually study.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29

It seems to me that the scariest part of doing interstellar finance is the concern that the institutions that, say, enforce bonds (or otherwise give them meaning, I'm not sure of the mechanics) will disappear sometime during your round trip. A lot can happen in 50 years, much more in a 500 year interstellar round trip. I would expect interstellar trade to stick with "real" goods only for this reason.

Submitted multiple times before, but here's the only one I saw with comments, in case some finds something interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818706

See also Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage: http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf

More interesting is what resources or products would be potential candidates for interstellar trade.

hard science, art, and entertainment?

Probably information -- art, music, culture, scientific discoveries, technological blueprints (that could be "printed" anywhere), software, genetic material, anything informational.

Information has the benefit of weighing nothing and being easily transmissible at the speed of light.

This is also probably true for interplanetary trade, such as with a Mars colony... though return of very precious materials via something inexpensive like gun launch can't be totally ruled out.

Going full sci-fi mode: if something like consciousness uploading were possible, it would also be possible for people to travel interplanetary and interstellar distances at the speed of light as information as long as something at the other end existed to reconstitute them. So one mechanism of interstellar colonization would be to send unmanned drone ships first, then encode ourselves and go.

Yea, send a drone -> build supercomputer -> export computing :)

Yes, long-term everything could be printed via nano-robots. Even if not directly but as a sequence of building different plants. So something like a seed nano-robot colony + manufacturing blue-prints.

Interstellar migration could be not unlike booting an embedded device via a slow serial link. First send the slow robotic "boot loader," then use it to download the colonists to the new star system and boot up a civilization.

Matter is everywhere. Information is what it's all about, and information travels at 'c'.

Well remember physics constrains everything, so it's interesting to look at that too. The reason we'll look into expanding in the first place is because of energy/material constraints in our own system. Some systems will require large "seeds" to boot up depending on how advanced we are at a particular point and how long can we wait for booting. Then as soon as it boots it will start receiving updates on how to improve itself, otherwise it would be terribly outdated by the time it starts exporting computing. What we choose to colonize will probably depend on the specifics of the system, like solar power output, material availability at planets, etc. There's a question on what kind of information the seeds will produce too: improving themselves should be largely redundant with the improvements made by the colonizers, which would be streamed to the new planets. So they'll be some very long term tasks so it can be efficiently divided across the decade-or-more latency separated systems.

I need to write a book about this some day. It's just so fun to imagine :)

It might not be practical to send information as light. You'd need a powerful transmitter so your signal can be detected among the noise from stars. It might turn out that sending a spaceship is actually cheaper and just about as fast. The spaceship can steer itself and doesn't spread out the further it goes.

I think galactic civilization will either solve noise problem or install enough repeaters if that's cheaper. Repeater network will have enormous fixed cost, but I don't think its variable cost will be higher than spaceships.

Information has the benefit of weighing nothing and being easily transmissible at the speed of light

There is the interesting twist that if you could position some sort of device on an interstellar information trade route, you could harvest both sides trades "for free".

So one mechanism of interstellar colonization would be to send unmanned drone ships first, then encode ourselves and go.

Richard Morgan has a bunch of books about something like this, his hero Takeshi Kovakz travels digitally from planet to planet, sometimes waking up in a cheap or worn out body and having to upgrade later. In this case the bodies are "dumb" and need a mind loaded into them. I can't remember if its one of his books where there is a colony ship that grows children from babies, educating and socializing them with robots, which goes horrifically wrong.

Asteroid natural resources comes to mind.

http://www.planetaryresources.com/

Shlepping atoms around between stars is probably way more expensive than it's worth, unless the destination star's orbiting bodies have a debilitating paucity of those particular kinds of atoms.

But, really, why would we consider colonizing somewhere so iron-deficient, for example, that we need to tow space rocks of the stuff in?

Kim Kardashian.

No really.

Assuming you're a hyper-evolved super-intelligent post-singularity being, I predict that nothing is going to make you feel better about your surprisingly boring extra-dimensional existence than watching the pathetic little meat sacks on unevolved worlds continually missing opportunities for advancements and obsessively focusing on irrelevant trivia (why it's just like the good old days!). Just insert the galactic laughtrack signal and hilarity ensues, reality television on a galactic scale.

In fact, for all we know, we're already the galaxy's equivalent of Sea Monkeys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-Monkeys) whilst assuming we were closer to the Sand Kings.

Or as Edmund Kean said on his death bed: "Dying is easy, it's comedy that's hard."

Interesting. Krugman has said that he got interested in economics because it was the closest thing in reality to psychohistory as described in Asimov's Foundation series. Of course, any society capable of interstellar trade would be beyond scarcity and hence economics as we know it. But fun, nonetheless.

You say that, but go back a few hundred years and you can make an analogous statement about worldwide trade. Yet, our consumption of resources have increased to meet the level of production, and scarcity still exists.

You have to get a grasp on the scale of the cosmos to understand what I mean. To get to the nearest star system, alpha centauri, you would need a matter/antimatter reactor that would turn approximately 10 kilograms of mass into pure energy to approach .8c, where c is the speed of light ( and the assumption here is that we acheive near 100 percent efficiency in our propulsion mechanism, which is impossible). Any society capbable of doing so would be far beyond celestial scavenging for a few trinkets, in the same manner that our global economy is beyond scavenging for artifacts from brazilian tribal rituals, historical curiousity notwithstanding.

"It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

I'm actually more interested in the theory behind how he got a grant to write this. Interesting nonetheless!

I think that line was a joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award

Man, the wiki page really makes him look like a short-sighted jerk. A lot of those items are the stereotypical headlines that lack the needed context.

Like the $3k for if military should use umbrellas in the rain: well, should they? Perhaps only officers, so soldiers have their hands free? Maybe we should just contract a clip of some kind that will hold the umbrella to their gear? Or maybe it's only worth it on base? I mean, how far will $3k even go - a week or so of consultant time?

Or the $57k for measuring stewardesses. These are the people who may still be moving about the cabin while everyone else is seated. How do we decide how much a seat on a $100,000,000 plane needs? Can the seat be wider just above the waist of the lady, such that the seats can slightly encroach on the isle? (Big money to be had there possibly - though it's worth noting the 1975 flights likely still had an implicit assumption about stewardess ... styling.) Is it reasonable the typical rider can squeeze past a stewardess? How often and with what kind of difficulty? Will they be required to get out of the way in the event of an emergency or should they stay to direct, potentially blocking the path? In this case, we spent about $130 bucks a few hundred times. An engineer needed those numbers somewhere down the line, and hopefully some insight was gained. Never mind that someone had the (likely) enviable job of measuring the fitting of a few hundred 1970s-style stewardesses.

I'm not saying a lot of the stuff's doesn't make me gloriously incredulous, but it's super easy to just take something at face value and just mock it. (Not that your linking it implies anything - people who mock like Proxmire just get my goat.)

I especially enjoyed the following paragraph from the paper:

"It should be noted, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics"

This was the first paper he wrote after earning tenure at MIT. It was his blowing off steam fun project.

Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?

s/world/interstellar trade routes/

Its interesting to me that this is written by Krugman. I am glad to see that he has read The High Frontier, Its one of my personal favorites.

This is essentially The Martian of the pre-Internet era.

Where is Figure II?

On page 7!

"Readers who find Figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary."

Since it is imaginary, you have to imagine it.

"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 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 traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved."

He goes on to say this work may have some galactic relevance and that the force is with him.

He's so funny and smart, and yet guys like him are one of the bigger obstacles on this planet to accumulating enough capital to finance space exploration. Makes you think...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com