In a recent working paper, I brought the analysis of financial systemic risk to bear on this question.
In his movie “Clerks,” for example, the writer and director Kevin Smith has his protagonists debate the ethics of destroying the second Death Star, whose construction was still underway, given the collateral damage to the contractors (“plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers”) building it.Īs a financial engineer, I have another concern: the economic repercussions for the “Star Wars” galaxy. Audiences typically respond to the destruction of the Death Star with triumphant cheers.īut over the years, a number of perhaps more reflective fans have paused to question the consequences of this event.
But even if the Empire went as far as to hire professional contractors, imagine how that would go with the Emperor.AT the end of “Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi,” the heroic Rebel Alliance defeats the evil Galactic Empire, destroying the second Death Star, the empire’s central space station (and superweapon).
Palpatine isn’t just some phony orange hemorrhoid in a cheap, ill-fitting suit. Lawsuits? Making deals? Cheating on taxes? Ridiculous games. Palpatine makes Donald Trump look like, well, the tiny-handed impotent baby that he is. Why do you think the Jedi were so busy? Watch the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series: you’ll see how it was! Do you want to build a death star? Labor costs mean nothing to the Empire! If the workers can’t keep up, the empire just commits genocide and moves on. Then they steal all the supplies from rebel relief missions. They conquer moon and planets and confiscate their resources. The rebels weren’t rebelling over, like, stamp taxes. This is the whole problem with the dark side system of government. You don’t have to worry about budgets when your system of government is literally pure evil. What about THE GALACTIC EMPIRE sounds that self-limiting?Īnd then there’s money. There is no way the empire had only one mining planet in one single little star system. Not an asteroid, not a small moon: the whole entire volcanic planet Mustafar was a mine. ANAKIN SKYWALKER WAS BURNT TO A CRISP ON A MINING ***PLANET***.
The estimates are also concerned with where to get enough steel to build a whole entire death star or two. This is dumb, because we just don’t know what type of alloys they were using a long time ago in a galaxy far away. The estimates all base the calculations on steel. is only one country on one planet, with no off-world resources. government, with all its rules (including its insistence on paying workers and not just killing them at the end of the job) could never take on a project the magnitude of a small moon. Sure, one of them might be right, if it were America or the Earth building death stars. The problem with all these estimates is that they are wrong. The paper concludes that “the total cost of building two Death Stars in ‘A New Hope’ and ‘Return of the Jedi’ was $419 quintillion (billion billion) dollars when research and development are also factored in.” This very academic paper actually estimates death star costs in context of the Empire’s “Gross Galactic Product,” which Feinstein figures to be $92 sextillion. It’s a Trap: Emperor Palpatine’s Poison Pill, by Professor Zachary Feinstein at Washington University in St. “The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon,” via an official statement titled This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For.Īn independent estimate on death star construction costs, from a Canadian tech expert named Ryszard Gold, came in at $15.6 septillion and 94 cents. The US government responded with a resounding no, stating The Leigh University project also inspired a White House petition to begin building a death star by this year.