http://hanson.gmu.edu/econofsf.html
Excerpt:
Academic discussion of the non-immediate future seems almost non-existent. Yet the topic is of widespread popular interest. Why? The explanation seems obvious: it seems very hard to say anything rigorous about the topic, and individual academics avoid the topic in order to distinguish themselves from the sloppy wishful thinkers who seem to dominate the topic.
Most discussion of the non-immediate future seems to take place in science fiction, and the small subset of science fiction where authors try hard to remain realistic is called hard science fiction. Loosely associated with hard science fiction is an intellectual community of people who try to make projections which are true to our best understanding of the world. They work out the broad science and engineering of plausible future space colonies, starships, virtual reality, computer networks, survellience, software assistants, genetically engineered people, tiny machines made to atomic accuracy, and much more.
Unfortunately, few if any people of these people know much social science. So their projections often combine reasonable physics or computers with laughable economic assumptions. This often seriously compromises their ability to make useful projections.
Professional economists, on the other hand, do understand social science, and often do talk about the future. Quite a few of them are even paid a lot to think about what the next hot technology will be. Economists, however, seem to almost completely ignore the longer-term implications of specific envisionable technologies. When looking more than a few years out, they almost always abstract away from specific technologies and think in terms of aggregate economic processes, which are assumed to keep on functioning much as they do today.
This leaves an unfilled niche, which I call the "economics of science fiction", or the "economics of future technology." This is economic analysis of the sorts of assumptions typically explored in science fiction. It is distinguished from the typical hard science fiction analysis by using the tools of professional economics, rather than the intuitive social science of the typical engineer. And it is distinguished from most economics by taking seriously the idea that we can now envision the outlines of new technologies which may have dramatic impacts on our society.
The best way to explain what I mean in more detail is to give some examples of it. Here is a collection of articles by others I think of as examples....
