I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance: he thinks there’s something new about science fiction novels where the science in question is economics.

This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that’s actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough.

Oh, by the way — it’s a terrible novel, though not as bad a novel as The Internecine Project is a movie. Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading.

Update: Several commenters mentioned Issac Asimov’s Foundation novels. It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get.