Slashdot Mirror
Economists Discuss the Financial Repercussions of the Destruction of the Death Stars (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: What would the Galactic Economy look like following the destruction of two Death Stars? This is the informed Star Wars debate taking shape between to people who know their economics. Elliot Williams, a Ph.D. in Econometrics, has just debunked the work of Zachary Feinstein who claimed that the Rebel Alliance would have been off had they not destroyed the two Death Stars because what they're left with is a Galactic Economy in ruin. Feinstein, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, published a scholarly paper early this month saying it was financial suicide to destroy both of the giant construction projects. Williams' take on things is that the project was a sunk cost; destroyed or whole the Death Star expenditures already made are gone and not likely to further cost or benefit the new government. Perhaps most interesting in the discussion is how you estimate the cost of the Death Star projects and the GGP — the Galactic Gross Product of the fictional universe.
Work on real problems, and if you can't see any and you're an economist, you're also fired.
The first poor logism here is that their economy runs on MONEY in the first place and that the EMPIRE is not just some communist enclave that forces ppl to just build whatever the hell it wants.
This could be used as an allegory for the abrupt closure of banks "too big to fail."
"It's not even paid for!!!"
Everyone else is discussing what utter fucking oxygen parasites economists are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But then again, I suppose this is fun to an economist...
Whatever floats your boat man.
I guess I don't recall anyone ever talk about money in any of the movies. Do we even know that the whole galaxy was on a capitalist system? I just can't imagine that you could build a Death Star in a capitalist society where you are paying all of your workers a living wage... not to mention your huge standing army....
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
...but tax it. What is the empire's pension plan anyway?
Fucked up their own world beyond all recognition, now live in and solve problems of imaginary worlds.
Plot twist: economies of imaginary worlds become equally as fucked up as the real world, economists are banned from imaginary worlds by their inhabitants.
Oh the BITTER irony.
So the Death Star may be too-big-to-fail? Well, then break up the monopoly into many smaller Death Asteroids and let them compete with each other. If you want to fry big planets, then you use multiple Death Asteroids on the same target.
It's also easier to sell off Death Asteroids because only big clusters could afford a full Death Star. Death Asteroids could be sold to the more numerous smaller clusters.
Table-ized A.I.
Because the Empire is subject to interest bearing loans or any kind of 'loan' and could cause a bank collapse... yea right.. Good things happen when the yoke of economic tyranny and fascism break.
Sorry Vader, your credit was denied.
It's helping to keep at least two economists focused on something other than real-world situations, where their advice would inevitably cause more harm than good.
That doesn't make sense.
I don't count myself an expert in Star Wars trivia, but if the Empire is anything like the Roman empire, then economic expansion via military force is a key part of its economic growth. You conquer new lands for tribute, booty, resources, labor/slaves, and so on.
A death star is a valuable military weapon that could conceivably improve the economy by allowing the Empire to more easily (and more cheaply) conquer new systems. In terms of conventional industrial economics, it's like having a vastly superior factory.
A loss of the Death Star would both be an economic loss of the investment and much slower revenue growth because you'd have to fight harder to conquer new systems with more conventional weapons (to the extent that a Super Star Destroyer is a conventional weapon).
Economist....ESPECIALLY PROFESSORS. People, who have never (usually) worked OUTSIDE of schools, colleges their entire lives, teaching at business colleges and universities. Instructing those wanting a business degree on how business works, have NEVER started, run, maintained a business. On paper, their theories are sound. In practice, most would fall flat on their face!
Reminds me of the Endor Holocaust which would have pretty much ended life on Endor due to the billions of tons of material raining down on the planet.
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/holocaust.html
Thanks, JJ!
Well, it's really not that hard. Basically they cost only time and fuel, since you can loot the raw materials from rebel and/or independent planets and use rebel scum for free/slave labor. You don't even have to pay the supervising soldiers since complainers end up doing slave labor and there'll be always enough dumb morons who'd prefer to be loyal soldiers than slaves. Easy peasy.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
If the GGP can survive the total destruction of Alderon, I think the galactic economy can survive the loss of two Death Stars. Then there is also the clone wars. Frankly, it requires a bit of suspension of disbelief to think that the Galactic economy can function at all since the Galaxy seems to be perpetually at war.
Just like the last financial crisis, whoever owns the derivatives on the AAA Mortgage Backed Securities on all that Alderon Property, that will never be paid back, is going to make quadrillions of credits.
I thought this was the whole point of the first destruction at least, to not be annihilated by it. But I guess economics can't comprehend the value of survival?
Traveller's High Guard rules would probably be the best. You'd just have to have the Referee figure out what the cost of a "Turbo Laser" is, either by assuming it's just a meson gun or something else that would be determined by percentage of ship.
Faster than light travel, almost infinite energy production and robotics opens the whole galaxy to mining operations. Death stars would be cheap in that situation.
I don't have to read Dr. Williams' rebuttal to see that Mr. Feinstein was either trolling or lacking knowledge on some fundamentals of wartime economics: if the enemy is using a resource as a weapon in combat, it needs to be in some way destroyed or neutralized... especially if said weapon has and can be used to vape your civilian means of production, along with 100% of the co-located civilians.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Let's set aside the fact that this is a fictional universe and the empire can do pretty much whatever the writers want it to.
I'm guessing this means the allies should have just let germany run over all europe in WW2, since that would have left them with an expensive army to maintain which would bankrupt them?
This is not how things work. The death stars allow the empire to gain territory. Territory equals resources.
Less territory for the alliance equals less resources for them and more for their enemy.
If the death star wasn't giving a good return on investment, they would just scrap it, or turn it into luxury condos or something.
The thing was already built. It's being used to threaten planets into slavery. Why not destroy it?
for things as trivial as trying to get a prisoner to talk is going to have a larger impact on the galactic economy than the destruction of the death star.
All depends on the prices
Seriously. It's a Death Moon. Ya, I know I/we heard someone say it wasn't a moon, but it is. Though I'm sure that if the International Astronomical Union (IAU) had there way, it would be called the Death Dwarf Planet or Death Asteroid. I'm going with Death Moon. Not nearly as sexy as "Death Star" or "AT&T" though.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Didn't consider the economic impact of blowing up Alderaan. PS: I didn't RTFA
and politician does , they made shit up and called it processed information.
The true story is somewhat different, and it is about corruption. It's Empire, you know. Darth Wader got a government contract to build a Death Star. It was built not from iron and steel, but from cheapest available materials, using non-qualified workers and third-world subcontractors. In fact, the quality of the construction was so low, that it could fire only once. The Emperor somehow was aware of this affair and arranged an investigating committee (everything goes slow in Galactic Empires). At the time of Episode 4, this committee was already on board of the Death Star. Darth Wader had to do something to get away from this trouble. And he asked his children for help. He gave drawing of the Death Star to Leia and she delivered them to rebels. Rebels successfully destroyed the Death Star and the investigating committee. The only person who could run away was Darth Wader. And later he got another contract from the government - to build another Death Star. Which was never finished.
From the economical point of view, corruption is not good, but the waste of valuable construction materials was not so substantial. Most of the money went to Darth Wader's pockets.
Prof. Feinstein should cower in shame and eat all his credentials. Wartime and peacetime economies are quite different things. Let's remember the resurgence of the mighty Japanese economy after WWII, which left the whole country in ruins.
Yes, clearly worse to be showered in chunks of cheap scrap metal than be completely vaporised.
I can has to death stars off better by. To Sim citys
I only learned from this that the Resistance won't destroy death stars anymore. The two death stars were destroyed in episodes IV and VI.
I think that should be the Gross Galactic Product. It's the same with every government: There's always money to fund another weapon of mass destruction, but none to fund free universities. The only reason for a Death Star is large-scale robbery, so it's a self-fulfilling philosophy: Rob planets to build a Death Star, build a Death Star to rob (more) planets.
A better solution would have been to figure out how to permanently disable the "death" part of the deathstar and use it as a giant space ship/space-station to move massive amounts of people.
Yeah blowing it up is cooler. Politically the Death Star is the "border fence" in the US. It's something that is very expensive and is only used to punish "everyone", rather than, y'know changing political policies so that there is no incentive to hire illegals.
Some people got terribly rich building the most expensive piece of kit ever and their design sort of guaranteed a short life. You want another one? Sure.... $$$$
Of having an entire planet obliterated from your economy by a Death Star?
Parts of our world are always at war, yet we function.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
On the contrary, it'd have resulted in an economic boon for the Republic. The deathstar is a sunk cost; the production and supply facilities which were not in orbit for the purposes of construction are now sitting idle. This is likely many star systems worth of mining operations, refinery,
Think about what happened in WWII in the US: typewriter manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, etc. all quickly shifted gears to produce planes, tanks, and guns - enough weapons that we were supplying the Russians, British, and ourselves. At the end of the war, that production capacity was turned towards domestic production of goods.
I'm sure there was a bit of an economic setback due to the loss of (entirely human) life, particularly in the logistics and research departments, but I suspect that'd be offset by allowing Bothans to perform such roles, for which they're superior.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As I said when the first story was posted... go look at the Senate of the Old Republic. Even assuming two Senators, instead of just one... how many *thousands* of boxes, one for each planet, in the OR did you count?
So, this estimate's wrong, also, because they scale is off of the *sources* of the Empire's revenue. I'd guess their revenue is orders of magnitude larger than either economist is estimating. I'd put the cost of a Death Star at about the cost of maybe two of the next generation of nuclear aircraft carriers. *Maybe* even a battle groups (that's a carrier, and its supply and defence ships).
Economic collapse... hell, maybe the planets Wall St. I, II, and IV, as well as Planet Bank America, but in the economy of the entire Empire, none of them are "too big to fail".
mark
This is assuming the empire was a capitalist society? I'm pretty sure the good old emperor was not a capitalist. I highly doubt it would of had more than a slight delay in the Empires plans. I'm also pretty sure the Empire would have functioned more like a socialist, or communist economy and that labor and materials would have been no issue at all. Sigh... Americans...
Compare to the NSA Echelon and Cybersecurity data centers. (Heck, consider on-the-books programs like various planes and ships over recent history.) Our current economic system has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to spend oodles of money on military projects with little long-term-investment economic benefit (beyond the salaries of the people involved), so why should the Empire be less capable, especially if it has a lot more member states (and combinatorically-more interstate commerce!) to tax? Skimming the fractional hundredths off rounding should have paid for the whole thing without anyone ever noticing until it was too late.
If you want to think of REAL tech problems, consider that the Death Star was probably built (like the Gemini 6 Titan II) by the lowest bidder.
wasnt this posted earlier in trhe week or month?
Wouldn't the economic impact of suddenly losing (presumably) billions of people, their assets, and their economic inputs to the galactic economy be a *much* bigger hit than losing a couple hundred thousand lives (ballpark numbers) to the first Death Star (and much less from the incomplete second), assets and the associated manufacturing involved?
Wouldn't the perpetuation of a weapon capable of so much economic (and literal) destruction be a significantly larger threat to the galactic economy than the actual loss of said weapon?
... is that calculations are most of the time done on a linear scale, while a logarithmic scale would be much better. On a linear scale annihilation is a 100% loss, compensated by a doubling of the value, which is a 100% profit. But this is not how it works, after a 100% loss nothing is left and a doubling still leaves nothing. This makes large risks look much smaller than they actually.
On a logarithmic scale annihilation is an infinite loss. 50% loss is equivalent to 100% profit, which makes much more sense.
Economics is not just the posturing of mad economists. On the basic level it is real.
Economics is based on the laws of Thermodynamics. Of course, the economists don't usually know that... 8-)
Even if there is no money and no corporations, economics will still apply to efforts to get anything done. Like feeding people. So banishing money will not help. Money is just an easy way to keep track. Even with no governments, you would still have to decide what to do and what to use up in order to get it done. And what to forgo in order to succeed. Starting with Time. And that is what economics -really- is.