NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money, I'm Wailin Wong.

And I'm Adrienne Ma.

When Reshma Hussam was in high school, she knew that she wanted to study economics.

So in her college application essay, she talked about what inspired her to choose that major.

And in particular, she talked about these books that she'd read.

So my college essay began with Foundation and how I had discovered this thing called

Psychohistory.

Foundation, Psychohistory, these are not references to classic economic texts like Adam Smith,

the wealth of nations, or a monetary history of the United States by Milton Friedman and Anna

Schwartz.

Foundation is a series of novels by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

And these books have been cited by economists from a former central bank governor to Nobel

prize winner Paul Krugman as having shaped their interests at a formative age.

In the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov created this fictional scientific discipline that

basically uses math to save the world.

It was such a powerful idea that when people like Reshma Hussam, Red Foundation, as teenagers,

it helped set them on a career path in economics.

To day on the show, we talked with Reshma and another economist for whom these novels

were foundational.

They tell us what drew them to Asimov's ideas and where they had to leave the realm

of science fiction behind to grapple with real world problems.

...