My coworker pointed me to a Paul Krugman paper written in 1978 titled “The Theory of Interstellar Trade.” Here’s the abstract:
“This article 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 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.”
Hysterical. The whole thing is worth a skim. This figure just takes it home:
