Episode 33: Science fiction explains our messed up economy
Will these Hyundai robots replace human labor?
We talk to economist Noah Smith about how different theories of economics show up in science fiction -- and how economics is also an exercise in speculative worldbuilding. How do ideas about "rational actors" make their way into space operas, and why is everyone so obsessed with game theory? Will robots replace all human labor? Plus, did Ayn Rand ruin everything?
Works cited, etc:
Noah Smith on Bloomberg and Twitter
Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin
Makers, by Cory Doctorow
The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin
World of Warcraft
Eve Online
Reamde, by Neal Stephenson
Dune, by Frank Herbert
Marie Kondo, creator of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and the KonMari method
Prediction Machines, by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
The Inner Lives of Markets, by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan
Concrete Economics, by Stephen S. Cohen and Bradford DeLong
The CORE Economics Project, an economics education resource that’s free