Partisan nonsense aside, Krugman’s Nobel Prize has been attributed to his important contributions to trade. GALACTIC trade. See the amazing “economics of interstellar trade.” Here’s the abstract:

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 by computed when the 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.

Marc Reinganum also has a good piece that disproves the possibility of time travel, given the existence of positive interest rates. If time travel were in fact possible, he posits, all interest rates would fall to near zero as profit opportunities were snatched up by rapacious time-traveling hedge fund managers.

Finally, though hardly as interesting as the coming war of man against machine – Robin Hanson examines the probable economic impacts of machine intelligence. He concludes that we’re screwed, but also makes the assumption that no new job types will be created:

By distinguishing the complementarity between different job roles from the possibility of substituting machines for humans in particular roles, we can reconcile our historical observation of rising human wages and machines which complement human labor with frequent predictions of eventual machine substitution and consequent falling human wages. Our models show that wages can rise a great deal for a long time before eventually falling dramatically.