Interesting “what if” project: Canadian economist calculates the cost to build the Death Stars; uses that to estimate the GGP (Gross Galactic Product); concludes that given the amount of resources put into the Death Stars, blowing them up would trigger Galactic Great Depression; thinks that’s the explanation for the scavenger economy at the beginning of “The Force Awakens”.
“It’s a Trap! The Economic Argument against Blowing Up the Death Star”
I have to think the Galactic Civil War was largely an economic disaster anyway.
But the scavenger economy on Jakku only exists in the first place because of all the Imperial hardware rusting out in the desert.
Doesn’t the Galactic Empire use a command economy?
What about the destruction of Alderaan? You’d think an actual planet would have a more developed economy than a military base.
What’s the economic results of blowing up a few planets?
When the Death Star enters a system, how long before its stock market drops?
According to Wookiepedia, Alderaan had a population of 2 billion. Coruscant alone has over a trillion inhabitants. So in population terms it’s like blowing up a small island nation, with a few thousand inhabitants, here on earth. Alderaan did seem to have bigger political influence than its size suggests.
Blowing up the Death Star was not an economic disaster. Building it in the first place was.
Tarkin could have gotten so rich. Move the Death Star into a system, buy up all the choice properties at microns on the credit, and then decided to “demonstrate the power of this vessel” somewhere else. He’d have been the richest man in 100 star systems.
Until the Emperor had Vader retire him, for not getting into the spirit of the whole “evil” thing. Profit is not evil. Profit is good. Stomping a boot on the face of the galaxy, forever. THAT’s the spirit!
The guy doesn’t make any sense.
Blowing up the Death Star only cost a few fighters and proton torpedoes.
It’s building it in the first place that costs all the money.
But think of the stimulus factor that must have been created in building the infrastructure just to build the Death Star, the R&D, actually building it, and then times two (but minus some of the R&D) for the second one! That’s millions of jobs, if not tens of millions. And government jobs too - benefits, workplace safety standards, and a guarantee that inevitable cost overruns would not come out of the profits. Not to mention all of the funeral, life insurance, and estate business generated by all the dead Imperials on both Death Stars, ships, and fighters.
Remember, the Empire does not have the same notion of “workplace safety standards” that our government does.
I don’t get it—what would destroying the Death Star do, economically, that building it didn’t do already? I’ll have to have a look at the paper…
Well, they did have to build another one. Or at least, a significant fraction of one. Which they appear to have done in, I dunno, six months? So I think they must be underestimating the effect that either robots or cloned construction forces can have on an economy.
I agree. Arguing otherwise seems to be ignoring economics.
If you spend 200 quintillion dollars building a Death Star and then it gets blown up, your economy just lost 200 quintillion dollars. But if you spend 200 quintillion dollars building a Death Star and it doesn’t get blown up, you’re not much better off. It’s not like a working Death Star is going to produce 200 quintillion dollars worth of value in your economy; all it does is blow up planets, which reduces your overall economy. Plus there’s the cost of operating the Death Star, even if you don’t use it. In economic terms, if you’re stupid enough to build a Death Star, the smartest thing you can do with it is blow it up.
Yes, but you fail to remember that the point of the Death Star was to keep the subject systems in line. They were already removing themselves from the Imperial Economy by going over to the Rebellion. As long as the Death Start prevents greater economic loss via such defections than it cost to build in the first place, it’s an overall economic gain for the Empire, even if it’s a loss for the galaxy as a whole. Sith don’t care if they screw up someone else’s economy, so long as they have all the Lava Palaces they’re ever wanted.
Another vote for the “building it” is the economic issue.
Military projects are varied in terms of economic impact. Some create a lot of new, useful technology that spreads into civilian life. Some are basically pyramid building. Done for show and worthless as can be.
I strongly suspect it’s mostly the latter.
Most of the apparent technology seems common place in the Star Wars Universe. The big, possible, exception is the giant planet busting ray mechanism itself. Given the widespread use of blaster devices, is this a whole new concept or is it just a scaling up? There does seem to some “violation of the laws of thermodynamics” stuff going on. How do you get all that energy to pass out of the Death Star in a short period of time without causing an immense amount of collateral damage to the ship?
If there is “something special” about the Death Star tech, what are the civilian uses? Partially blasting small, unoccupied, planets to get the core for mining? Taking out very large asteroids heading towards an occupied planet? Etc.
All seems like a bit of overkill given other ways of obtaining resources or generally shoving things around.
Loss of lives, and loss of jobs in support industries: non-trivial costs from the destruction.
No one has ever proven conclusively that people have gotten hurt or killed from tight ledges and work spaces that are suspended hundreds of feet in the air, like the tractor beam switch Obi Wan turned off. All 41,382 people who fell were determined to be suicides.