So we finally managed to escape the house/kids/dog to see Star Wars the Force Awakens.
Here are some questions about the economy of the past/future/whatever….
In some of the early scenes the scavenger girl is polishing up space junk before selling it to a dealer. In a world full of intelligent robots (“droids”), why are there any humans (or human-like creatures) performing manual labor and living far below the standard of an American classified as “impoverished”?
The planets depicted don’t seem heavily populated. Thus it would seem that there has been no Malthusian expansion of population such that everyone is down to a subsistence level. If there are whole planets full of resources and the possibility of droid labor, why wouldn’t everyone be living large, e.g., in a plush McMansion built by local droids?
Interplanetary/interstellar travel seems to be pretty cheap, as evidenced by the existence of bars catering to people from all around the galaxy. If it is affordable to go inter-stellar to get a drink with friends, it should be affordable to transport otherwise scarce materials from one planet to another. Therefore the existence of poverty can’t be explained by a shortage of a particular material. (And where was the parking lot for that bar, by the way? Why didn’t we see the ships in which the customers had arrived? Were they all using an Uber-like service?)
Can it be that having enough wars to fill up nine movies has destroyed most accumulated wealth?
Why are they bothering to wage these wars? Are there massive tariffs to be collected from trade? (Thus giving rise to Han Solo’s smuggling career.) We don’t see anyone paying sales tax or income tax in the movies. What’s the point of owning a planet if you don’t get tax revenue?
Readers: What is the explanation? (And, separately, has everyone recovered from the emotional trauma of not being reunited with Jar Jar Binks?)
Related:
- “Star Wars: The Economics Of The Galactic Empire” overview from Investopedia
- overview from Wookieepedia
- “What ‘Star Wars’ teaches us about economics” — it is all about inequality
- “What ‘Star Wars’ gets wrong about blacks and women” (Washington Post) — it is all about race and gender within one of the many galactic species
- “An economics professor explains how the Empire built the Death Star” — it is all about the form of government
Don’t forget all those destroyed societies now have an opportunity for complete infrastructure replacement subsidized by the victors in an attempt to forestall the creep of Universal Communism.
My teenage son was explaining to me that the feeling is that the current populations have forgotten how to create droid technology. That’s why, for instance, they can’t wake R2D2 from deep sleep. They can polish them and repair them a little, but they have lost the knowledge base. This also explains the sort of limited number of droids around, when you really would think every person would have one to do all sorts of menial tasks.