How many Imperial Building Inspectors are at the bottom of those shafts?
I’m guessing it’s just the same tech scaled up. And yes, it seems like overkill. The “small” blasts from the Death Star in Rogue One would kill every living thing on the planet. What’s the point of turning the planet into an asteroid field?
Ha! I’ve seen the movies. There’s not a railing to be had in the Death Star.
Any evidence that they have standards for the safety of anyone other than the Emperor?
Depending on the source, there could be as much as “nearly 50 million systems” in the Empire. That’s a lot of tax revenue, nevermind all the free robotic help. A Death Star doesn’t really seem much more extravagant than a squad of Star Destroyers or something.
In one book it mentioned that Alderanians were a large portion of technicians and workers, even on the Death Star itself and they were NOT happy with its destruction.
They probably assembled it from spare parts. As S.R. Haddon in *Contact *said: First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
They didn’t even bother to put one by those two workers who stood next to the beam when it was fired. 
The article writer doesn’t actually really think about the setting (and that’s okay, neither did George Lucas.) It is set in a universe with 1.) strong AI, 2.) antigravity, and 3.) FTL travel. All three technologies are cheap and easily available. In such a setting, you could set up a robot factory to build mining robots, refining robots, manufacturing robots, and assembling robots (including using those robots to make more robot factories.) Drop a robot factory on a suitable unoccupied planet, moon, asteroid, or comet with plentiful raw materials, stand back and wait for the robots to produce your Death Star, or your fleet of hundreds or thousands of Death Stars if you decide to cannibalize entire planets for resources . (The antigravity tech makes it easy to lift the manufactured materials off even a full planetary gravity well, and the FTL tech makes it easy to pick a suitable solar system.) You don’t need many paid employees, just mostly programmers and supervisors, and surely most of the robot designs would already be available “off the shelf.” Small countries, large companies, and especially rich individuals should all be well within the means to produce an arbitrarily large number of Death Stars.
Yes, basically. Which would seem to contradict much of the setting - in both the Empire and the Old Republic, we see poverty everywhere, from slaves to worn-out ships. The premise of robot factors should make Star Wars a post-scarcity economy in which the limitation is number of people, not raw resources or production capacity.
Since we do not see a post-scarcity economy, we must conclude that both the Empire and the Old Republic before it had a vested interest in creating artificial scarcity. They can build a Death Star as often as they want to without affecting the economy because they’re the only ones limiting the economy in the first place.
Of course not, people would be leaning on them all day.
They do seem to have invented a large number of robots with form factors that preclude them from doing any actual useful work. R2D2 can barely communicate (with people) and has no arms except for a couple of specialized manipulators. Apparently it’s designed as a mechanic, but can’t actually reach anything higher than about three feet off the ground. C3P0 has a human form factor, but appears to be utterly incompetent at anything in the physical line. And BB 8 has no apparent limbs, so I’m not sure what its purpose is. Moving rapidly, I guess.
Note–the Empire used slave labor during construction.
I think BB-8 has all the same sorts of specialized tools that R2-D2 does.
And the Star Wars AIs might actually be too strong to allow for a post-scarcity society. Sure, they’ve got droids, but those droids demand luxuries, and time off, and so on, and are perfectly capable of unionizing and striking if they don’t get them.
Sure, but aren’t droids largely treated as second-class citizens (or non-citizens) in much of the galaxy? There was the racist bartender at the cantina on Tatooine. Granted, that’s a backwater, but throughout the series, many characters seem to treat droids as disposable objects rather than sentient beings with fundamental rights.
I suppose that wouldn’t stop a droid strike, but I would think that restraining bolts and memory wipes would make striking difficult to start or maintain.
It’s an odd argument.
After estimating the cost of the Death Star he uses that number to calculate the size of the Imperial economy. 
The justification is the Manhattan Program cost that percentage of US GDP. He could have skipped everything before that since his assumption was really just major WMD programs would cost about the same % of GDP as the Manhattan Project. Nothing needs to be put in dollars. Just assume major WMD programs cost .21% of GDP/GGP.
It’s a tough assumption. It doesn’t account for any technological changes that might increase productivity or lower input prices on materials. It assumes that spending every year for the construction that was much longer than the Manhattan Project. He just kind of pulls it out and moves on.
It gets worse though. We didn’t have a downturn worse than the Great Depression after WWII. That’s with the WMD program being paired with huge spending on conventional forces that were either designed to be expendable (like ammo) or non-expandable sytems getting expended at big rates anyway (tanks, planes, ships, etc.)
He’s arguing that the Death Star cost a similar percentage of the GDP as the Manhattan project, and also arguing that blowing up the Death Star would crater the economy?
Er, does he know what we did with the final products from the Manhattan project? 'Cause we blew them up, too, and as you noted, the economy did pretty good immediately after WWII.
An economist who doesn’t understand the sunk-cost fallacy. I am curiously not surprised.