Paul Krugman: Sci-Fi Fan Boy

At the Beacon Blog, Mary Theroux posts an amusing video wherein Paul Krugman states that the US could get out of the slump by faking an alien attack.

If we, If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build up to counter the space alien threat and, really, inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. [...] There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

Seriously. It was on CNN. Of course, this isn't the first time Krugman has shown is Sci-Fi side. Here's the abstract from his paper titled "The Theory of Interstellar Trade":

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.