Saturday, August 11, 2018

Economists In Popular Fiction

Apparently, a character in a current movie, Crazy Rich Asians is an economist. Dan Kopf considers whether she is a good economist. In a couple of recent tweets, Paul Krugman reacts:

"Actually, I can fill this gap.

"There was a movie titled The Internecine Project ... with James Coburn as a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers who gets a bunch of people to kill each other to hide his evil past. Sounds good to me, but the movie was terrible." -- Paul Krugman, 9 August 2018

I do not know about the movie versions, but I can name a couple of book series with characters who are economists:

  • Meyer is the sidekick in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee mystery series. Meyer's houseboat is the John Maynard Keynes, until it is blown up. He replaces it with the Thorstein Veblen.
  • The love interest in the Bourne Identity series is an economist. If I recall correctly, Jason Bourne first meets her by carjacking and kidnapping her, and then forcing her to drive with him to Paris.

I don't think you can count the Marshall Jevons' mystery series, since that is a pen name for two economists.

1 comment:

Regina Chris said...

This is the Wikipedia entry of an author who wrote three mystery novels with an economics instructor as the main character:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Thomas-Graham

(I haven't read these books; but a friend did and she enjoyed them.)