Wash U Professor: Death Star Would Have Sunk the Star Wars Economy

[The Grim Squeaker]

Pretty neat.
Gizmodo summary
There's an ArXiv paper
It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill

Although others have worked out the cost of building a Death Star before, Feinstein decided to start from scratch, estimating the amount of steel and other raw materials required to build the planet-destroying weapon. After factoring in research and development, he arrived at a total cost of $419 quintillion dollars for both Galactic war machines.

That figure may sound mind-boggling, but we should remember that Emperor Palpatine had an entire Galactic Empire’s worth of assets at his disposal. Feinstein, for his part, was more interested in learning how the Imperial banking system would respond if the largest construction project in the Galaxy was suddenly destroyed. Popular Science explains his findings:

Following logic stitched together from prequels and Wookiepedia, we get a galactic banking sector with assets that are 60 percent of the gross galactic domestic product.
[Feinstein calculates the Galactic GDP to be roughly $4.6 sextillion per year.]
Since these banks are likely heavily invested in the Empire itself and the Death Star specifically, the destruction of one Death Star by intergalactic terrorists and the collapse of the Empire following the destruction of the second, would devastate the galactic markets, and create a financial crisis on a truly massive scale.

[Adam Reynolds]

Amusing, but I'm not sure conventional economic theory applies to the SW galaxy. A major problem in a nutshell is that the idea of output based on capital and labor doesn't work as it should(which helps destroy an idea that leads to that of inflation and growth). Because droids can do literally anything that a person could, and in almost all cases do it cheaper, there is absolutely no reason to ever have people working in the galaxy unless it is something for which droids are not trusted(like politics and in most cases military fuctions). Unless said labor is literally free, which might explain why slave labor is a thing.

Anyway, I also have a few problems with his assumptions. The first is his use of the Manhattan project as a point of reference to assume proportional GDP. I doubt that the Empire spent as much as the US did on the Manhattan project. Remember that the US was at war and thus was in a position in which anything and everything would have been thrown into it. By comparison, the Empire was in the aftermath of the Clone Wars in which rebuilding after that disaster would be necessary. Especially when a large portion of galactic infrastructure was both destroyed and split apart by the war itself.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I also can't imagine that galactic banks were "heavily invested" in the DSII since it was, y'know, a secret project.

[Jub]

I also can't imagine that galactic banks were "heavily invested" in the DSII since it was, y'know, a secret project.

Even the DSI would have been an off the books project.

[SpottedKitty]

I also can't imagine that galactic banks were "heavily invested" in the DSII since it was, y'know, a secret project.

The banks might have only thought they knew where the money was going. Could they have been vulnerable to someone plausible and oddly persuasive hawking something like the Darien Scheme or the South Sea Company?

[SAMAS]

I think The Clone Wars provides an answer. And ironically, it's in the episodes many people said they hated.

"Pursuit of Peace" and "Senate Murders" shows that the Republic is throwing itself into debt to finance the war, and said money is coming from the IG Banking Clan, which is loaning to both sides of the war, and recently got deregulated so they could loan even more. In the Season 6 episode "Crisis at the Heart", Palpatine is given control of the Banking Clan's assets. The implication seems to be that he used those assets to fund the Death Stars and other secret projects.

[Adam Reynolds]

I think The Clone Wars provides an answer. And ironically, it's in the episodes many people said they hated.

"Pursuit of Peace" and "Senate Murders" shows that the Republic is throwing itself into debt to finance the war, and said money is coming from the IG Banking Clan, which is loaning to both sides of the war, and recently got deregulated so they could loan even more. In the Season 6 episode "Crisis at the Heart", Palpatine is given control of the Banking Clan's assets. The implication seems to be that he used those assets to fund the Death Stars and other secret projects.

Part of that makes sense, but if he were building a Death Star, the proper thing to do would be to use the funds of the government that he is emperor of. When stretched out over 20 years, a black budget can do a lot. In the case of the second Death Star, given the much larger size and the much shorter construction time, I would argue that it used a disproportionate amount of the Empire's defense budget. It would explain why they fell so quickly in the new EU immediately following the destruction of the Death Star, they lacked the budgets to maintain their forces.

Remember that a Death Star is required to crack planetary shields. Because of this fact, it would make sense that there would be little reason to build large fleets of Star Destroyers when one could build a Death Star instead. Even though it is limited in terms of how many worlds it can go after, it is not in terms of the issue of

[Noble713]

I first saw this linked on ZeroHedge, but it's also on Vice and HuffPo. I'm just going to link to the actual paper....

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054v1.pdf

As someone who attended Wash U, I'm a bit saddened to see "assistant professors" citing Wookiepedia as a source. -_-
If this is the standard for modern academic rigor, then this whole forum deserves a Nobel Prize. I think his methodology of comparing the Death Star to the Manhattan Project in order to estimate the size of the Galactic economy is arbitrary and inherently flawed.

Discuss.

[biostem]

Heck, the fact that you pretty much have an entire galaxy's worth of planets, asteroids, and other celestial bodies, from which to gather raw materials from, makes the comparison moot. Now add to that the fact that, yet again, you have just so much space in which to conceal the research and development facilities, and it's even easier to conduct the project in secret. Lastly, since, well, you have an entire galaxy in which to work, finding the necessary manpower and machinery should be quite easy.

[Lord Revan]

the Death Star Project was probably closer to the development of the Stealth warplanes in the 1980s or the nuclear powered warships before that then the Manhattan Project. Meaning it certainly expensive and resource heavy but nothing that could threaten the Imperial Economy, hell from what we see of the imperial economy in the orginal trilogy it seems in decent condition.

I mean you'd think Lando would mention if there was recent economical difficulties and since it's minor plot point that Cloud City is small enough operation that it generally escapes imperial attention and stay independent, which means it belongs to the type of companies that suffer the most during economic down turns (aka the small independent ones).

[NecronLord]

I've merged the two topics on this.

Large scale nationalizations are going on, at least according to the deleted scenes. Perhaps to pay for military expenditures.

[Adam Reynolds]

I first saw this linked on ZeroHedge, but it's also on Vice and HuffPo. I'm just going to link to the actual paper....

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054v1.pdf

As someone who attended Wash U, I'm a bit saddened to see "assistant professors" citing Wookiepedia as a source. -_-
If this is the standard for modern academic rigor, then this whole forum deserves a Nobel Prize. I think his methodology of comparing the Death Star to the Manhattan Project in order to estimate the size of the Galactic economy is arbitrary and inherently flawed.

Discuss.

In fairness it isn't a serious academic work and there aren't really all that many proper sources on Star Wars material. It's not like he took his theories from Wikipedia.

[JamesStaley]

Hi Everyone. Let me introduce myself. The name is James Staley. I'm a guy, 53 years young, living in the town of Jones, Oklahoma (NE corner of Oklahoma City). My hobbies are Japanese anime, model kit building. I love history, with a special interest in military history, & I consider myself an "amatuer historian". Those are the qualities & interests I will be bringing to the table. I've been part of a few political discussion boards before, but this is my first Sci-fi/fantasy board.

Concerning the ? about how much the Death Star/Death Planet & other "Super Weapons" would co$t, and if they would/could bankrupt the Empire/First Order.

!. We don't know how many worlds are in the Empire, or more specifically, how many "TAXABLE
CITIZENS/SUBJECTS" there are. I think it's safe to assume "100's of millions/billions/trillions". That is a very large financial base to draw upon. I would say that any Galactic Empire is going to have access to virtually unlimited (tax) money.

2. This is not to say you can't go broke if you do nothing but spend your money on weapons. Can you say "Soviet Union"? How about "Roman Empire"?

3. Every empire in history has had it's so-called "Super Weapons": this could be anything from the horse & rider with bows (The Mongols) to nukes (Modern) to Deathstars (future). Yet is is often while trying to outfit an army of ground-pounding, Plain-Jane, run-of-the-mill Infantry and their equipment that ends up bankrupting even the richest nations. How much does it cost to clone a clone and outfit him with that beautiful "SHOOT-ME-DEAD"-WHITE armor?

4. The Empire/First Order are evil. What the hell do they care what it cost!?? The whole purpose of the darned things is to force everyone to pay their taxes or get blown up!! (Let's hope the IRS never figures this out!!).

Looking forward to your responses.
James Staley

[Lord Revan]

well the intresting thing is that especially after the prequels but even before them, the Galatic Empire when depicted well it's this monolithic "evil for the sake of evil" organization, they're a more realistic evil, as in they don't see their actions as evil or see them as the lesser evil to the alternatives.


Lets take Grand Moff Tarkin for example everything he does is for a purpose now that doesn't make his actions less evil (you might even argue it makes them more evil) but it's not evil for "x number of dark side points" there's a clear meaning to his actions regardless of how distasteful those actions are.

so they would care about the costs after all you cannot reach your goal without resources (unless your goal was to go bankrupt in which case you reached it already), but people tend to forget just huge the Empire is (million members and god knows how many lesser colonies and non-independent worlds).

[Abacus]

Yeah, I'm not buying what that article is peddling. The galaxy that the Galactic Empire ruled was too large and too well controlled by a 1,000-year heritage of Old Republic bureaucracy that the Empire inherited, not to mention the war plunder the Empire received by conquering former Separatist worlds. The amount of money the Emperor got out of squeezing the Banking Clan alone was probably enough to fund the DS1.

[Batman]

Not to mention that as materials go, both Death Stars combined represent a miniscule fraction of the resources available in a single star system.

[Sea Skimmer]

This paper is just economic 101 fail. Warships, and steel, and just about everything else get cheaper with volume, unit size and standardization. The Death Star's own size works to its advantage, while very expensive by any standard the only likely way to build it would be bulk orders of a scale large enough to justify investment in an entirely new supply chain. Few real life projects ever get to do that; more often designers are forced to use sub optimal materials and design methods precisely to avoid the costs of new supply chains completely. Modern aircraft are probably the only place where this isn't true as far as large objects go. But that's because they are weight critical and jet fuel is expensive.

Now if you could build a giant warship with utter justification for a custom supply chain and generally absurd size and that would make the cost savings per ton much greater then those we already observe with warship construction. The only way that shouldn't be true is if the the scale of the project was so large it created outright material shortages, driving up the cost. Given that both Death Stars were secret projects, and the resources of an entire Galaxy are on hand, that isn't a very plausible limitation. Nor one the author considers anyway. More likely the Death Star had a mix of custom and standard materials and parts, getting the best of both worlds. Enormous scale of new production where justified, and drawing on the huge scale of the Galatic economy where that was useful.

Ignoring economy of scale factor on this level of scale up is thus an enormous blunder. I'm not going to bother to do the math or exact values, but pretty much with real life warships a size increase of x6 is enough to cut cost per x by a third to a half. That sort of range. Now scale that ratio by a further x-million and you see where this is going. The savings will be finite, because for example the energy to melt steel doesn't change, but they could still be very very large. Building a single CVN at a time has no economy of scale at all. Ignoring might be forgivable, but not when the author then tries to make further sweeping conclusions based on his useless cost figure.

[Zor]

The biggest problem here is a matter of false equivelency. We don't know how much a tonne of starship grade durasteel costs and using real world comparisons is faulty. Imagine explaining to a roman ironmaster a Nimitz Class aircraft carrier, a 100,000 tonne steel ship or how much structural steel went into building New York. Such things would be utterly fantastic because by everything he knows about Iron tells him that working iron on such a scale can't be done.

Zor

[Khaat]

And the second Death Star would be started with an existing materials pipeline and labor pool: it would be cheaper to start work on it as soon as the first was complete, rather than dismantle and rebuild the construction infrastructure, just change the destination/location and add a star destroyer's garrison to the forest moon. Innovations and/or improvements in design (additional reactors for the superlaser), construction methodology, and such could be implemented more efficiently on a new station than in a refit to the existing station (had it survived).

S.R. Hadden: First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

[Galvatron]

Didn't the Empire capture the partially constructed Death Star from the separatists? Wouldn't that shave quite a bit off their overall expenditure?

[Lord Revan]

Didn't the Empire capture the partially constructed Death Star from the separatists? Wouldn't that shave quite a bit off their overall expenditure?

as far as I know the Geonosians were planning to build it but hadn't started yet (or at least nothing in AOTC or TCW didn't seem to imply that) and we don't know how much time had passed between Order 66 and fall of the Republic and the scene with the Imperial ships looking at a Death Star being built, so it could have been 100% imperial constrution.

[Purple]

When it comes to projects like that most of the cost is in the R&D anyway. Compare the cost of manufacturing an atomic bomb to the Manhattan Project.

[Galvatron]

Didn't the Empire capture the partially constructed Death Star from the separatists? Wouldn't that shave quite a bit off their overall expenditure?

as far as I know the Geonosians were planning to build it but hadn't started yet (or at least nothing in AOTC or TCW didn't seem to imply that) and we don't know how much time had passed between Order 66 and fall of the Republic and the scene with the Imperial ships looking at a Death Star being built, so it could have been 100% imperial constrution.

Per Wookieepedia, under the Death Star's canon section:

As the war raged on, the Ultimate Weapon saw construction over Geonosis. By the time the three-year conflict came to an end, workers had partially completed its framework. As the war ended, Darth Sidious got rid of his Confederacy puppets, including his own apprentice, and proclaimed the birth of a new, authoritarian Galactic Empire, anointing himself Emperor. The Ultimate Weapon project was immediately appropriated by the nascent Empire.

Looks like that part cites the ROTS novelization, but I can't confirm it myself.

[Lord Revan]

is there a page number I can check it out myself when I got the time.

[Galvatron]

is there a page number I can check it out myself when I got the time.

It doesn't say.