{"id":187591,"date":"2011-05-06T22:22:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-07T03:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/05\/06\/people-with-way-too-much-free-time-2\/"},"modified":"2011-05-06T22:22:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-07T03:22:00","slug":"people-with-way-too-much-free-time-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/05\/06\/people-with-way-too-much-free-time-2\/","title":{"rendered":"People With Way Too Much Free Time\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Perusing what Uncle Ted called &#8220;a series of tubes,&#8221; I came across <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.overthinkingit.com\/2011\/04\/25\/star-wars-death-star-economics\/\">Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction<\/a><\/i>: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<div style=\"color: blue;\"><b>Lee<\/b><br \/>What\u2019s the economic calculus behind the Empire\u2019s tactic of A)  building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the  threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said  destruction if the planet doesn\u2019t comply?<\/p>\n<p>Doesn\u2019t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost  productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and  providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of  that planet\u2019s output would have to be made up by increased output from  other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion  or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It  doesn\u2019t seem to make good economic sense.<\/p>\n<p><b>McNeil<\/b><br \/>This is a pretty standard imperial tactic for dealing with rebellion.  The Romans would do this in the eastern empire every once in a while. A  city would become a hotbed of rebellion, threatening to pull other  cities into the action. The Romans would wipe out that one city, no  matter how wealthy (Palmyra comes to mind) to put any other potential  rebels on notice.  Kind of like a mastectomy.  You lose one productive  part of the body in order to keep cancer from spreading.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Lee and Mcneil, along with Perich, Fenzel and Stokes (read the whole thing provide an interesting dialogue on economics and governance that is (I think) unintentionally a rather trenchant analysis of the current American imperial hubris.<\/p>\n<p>Just read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perusing what Uncle Ted called &#8220;a series of tubes,&#8221; I came across Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction: LeeWhat\u2019s the economic calculus behind the Empire\u2019s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[962,973,1083,1100,1002,1011,1058],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-40yrs","category-economy","category-friday-blogging","category-funny","category-good-writing","category-history","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}