Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says that what the United States needs right now to get the economy chugging again is a good old-fashioned fake alien invasion.
The U.S. economy is in pretty rough shape right now and all signs point to things getting a whole lot worse before they start to get better. Plenty of people have plenty of ideas on how to turn things around – raise taxes, cut spending, invade Canada – but Paul Krugman has what may be the most audaciously imaginative silver bullet of them all: fake an invasion of the planet by aliens from outer space.
“Think about World War Two, right? That was actually negative social product spending and yet it brought us out,” Krugman said in an interview on CNN. “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.”
“And then if we discovered, ‘whoops, we made a mistake, there aren’t actually any space aliens,’ we’d [still] be better,” he added.
Krugman, for the record, isn’t just some guy off the street with a stupid idea. He’s a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, a columnist for the New York Times and he won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. That’s a pretty solid CV right there.
He also pointed out, in support of his idea, that this isn’t the first time someone has put forth such a theory. “There was a Twilight Zone episode like this, in which scientists faked an alien threat in order to achieve world peace,” he said. “Well this time we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
via: BoingBoing
Published: Aug 18, 2011 03:30 pm