Jesus Christ: Q rating off the charts.

Which people who are currently famous will still be famous 10,000 years from now? It won’t be Gwyneth Paltrow, that’s for sure. Her singing at the Oscars last night nearly made Quadaffi surrender. But that very difficult question is taken on by the fertile mind of economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. An excerpt:

“I’ll go with the major religious leaders (Jesus, Buddha, etc.), Einstein, Turing, Watson and Crick, Hitler, the major classical music composers, Adam Smith, and Neil Armstrong.  (Addendum: Oops!  I forgot Darwin and Euclid.)

My thinking is this. The major religions last for a long time and leave a real mark on history. Path-dependence is critical in that area.

Otherwise, an individual, to stay famous, will have to securely symbolize an entire area, and an area ‘with legs’ at that. The theory of relativity still will be true and it may well become more important. The computer and DNA will not be irrelevant. Hitler will remain a stand-in symbol for pure evil; if he is topped we may not have a future at all. Beethoven and Mozart still will be splendid, but Shakespeare and other wordsmiths will require translation and thus will fade somewhat. The propensity to truck and barter will remain and Smith will keep his role as the symbol of economics. Keynesian economics may someday be less true, as superior biofeedback, combined with markets in self-improvement, ushers in an era of flexible wages, while market-based expected nominal gdp targetingprevents a downward deflationary spiral.”