The Statist's Wet Dream
I find it absolutely unsurprising that Paul Krugman was enthralled by the vision of a science that can be used by a few people to control the actions and futures of all humanity. He said “I want to be one of those guys!” I was captivated by the vision in the book as well, but my thought was always "how do we avoid these guys?" The second two books were about how government planners used mind control to deal with humanity whenever individuals had the gall to circumvent their plans. Lovely.
If I remember right, Asimov wrote the Foundation after reading the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The notion of how much of history is inevitable due to large forces (e.g. economics) vs. how much is due to the actions of individuals and what historians now call contingency (e.g. luck) is an endlessly fascinating thing to debate, and I found the Foundation books to be interesting thought exercises along these lines. But it certainly didn't inspire my life's goals, any more than Dune made me wish for a religious jihad.
I can see the secret Second Foundation scratching their heads now in their secret lair (which turns out to be in the New York Times building in the middle of New York City but that's a spoiler from the third book). The equations show right here that a trillion dollar stimulus should have kept unemployment below 8%....
