The Death Star would have cost £278,000,000,000,000,000,000© Unknown
Building a Death Star would be almost unbelievably expensive - so much so that the Galactic Empire would have crumbled after the Rebels destroyed not one but two of the machines.Using the prices of modern aircraft carriers as a guideline, Zachary Feinstein in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis worked out that the second Death Star would have cost £278 quintillion pounds.
That's £278,000,000,000,000,000,000- more money than there is on Earth.
The shock would have caused the entire Galactic financial system to collapse, Feinstein estimates - meaning that the Rebels might have had to bail out the ruined Empire.
'This project was really about modeling the size of the Galactic economy and banking sector,' Feinstein said.
'Once I had that, I simply applied my research on measuring financial systemic risk to determine the required bailout.'In the movies, both Death Stars are destroyed within a four-year time span, which would have been a staggering economic blow to the Imperial financial sector. To prevent a total financial collapse would require a bailout of at least 15 percent, and likely greater than 20 percent, of the entire economy's resources.
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"The most surprising result was how large the economic collapse could be," Feinstein said.
'Without a bailout, there was a non-negligible chance of over 30 percent drop in the size of the Galactic economy overnight — larger than the losses from the Great Depression over 4 years (from peak to trough).'The outlook appears very grim for the common Imperial citizen,' he said. 'I think it is unlikely the Rebel Alliance could have found the political will and financial resources to provide the necessary banking bailout until it is too late.
'It may be that the Force is awakening 30 years after the events of
Episode VI because of the economic forces at play,' Feinstein said.
Comment: Check out the real world version of the 'Galactic Empire' and their financial 'Death Star':
The Network of Global Corporate Control
Abstract
The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.
The Death Star didn't create any wealth by its existence, (except perhaps for on-going maintenance contracts).
I don't see how destroying it would change the state of the Imperial economy. It's not like it was a sound financial investment. Once built, weapons need to be destroyed in order to secure further construction contracts.
Just *building* the thing in the first place would shift wealth from taxes to private holdings, making some people very rich and distributing money to the direct contractors, but otherwise sucking enormous wealth from the rest of the economy, leaving many people without the benefit of any other social or infrastructure spending that taxes are, in an ideal world, *supposed* to be used for. (It didn't look like the Empire did much in the way of that; you either lived in a military base or you were scrounging in the dust.)