The Economics of the Death Star

Kevin Drum has a post challenging the conventional wisdom that the Death Star was an extremely expensive project. He concludes that “not only is the Death Star affordable, it’s not even a big deal”:

As background, some students at Lehigh University have estimated that it would be a very expensive project. The steel alone, assuming the Death Star’s mass/volume ratio is about the same as an aircraft carrier, comes to $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the world’s GDP. Is this affordable?

Let’s sharpen our pencils. For starters, this number is too low. Using the same aircraft carrier metric they did, I figure that the price tag on the latest and greatest Ford-class supercarrier is about 100 times the cost of the raw steel that goes into it. If the Death Star is similar, its final cost would be about 1.3 million times the world’s GDP….

But there’s more. Star Wars may have taken place “a long time ago,” but the technology of the Star Wars universe is well in our future. How far into our future? Well, Star Trek is about 300 years in our future, and the technology of Star Wars is obviously well beyond that. Let’s call it 500 years. What will the world’s GDP be in the year 2500? Answer: Assuming a modest 2 percent real growth rate, it will be about 20,000 times higher than today. So we can figure that the average world in the Star Wars universe is about 20,000 times richer than present-day Earth, which means the Death Star would cost about 65 times the average world’s GDP….

But how big is the Republic/Empire? There’s probably a canonical figure somewhere, but I don’t know where. So I’ll just pull a number out of my ass based on the apparent size of the Old Senate, and figure a bare minimum of 10,000 planets. That means the Death Star requires .03 percent of the GDP of each planet in the Republic/Empire annually. By comparison, this is the equivalent of about $5 billion per year in the current-day United States.

In other words, not only is the Death Star affordable, it’s not even a big deal. Palpatine could embezzle that kind of money without so much as waving his midichlorian-infused little pinkie.

If Drum’s figures are correct, why didn’t the Empire simply build an entire fleet of Death Stars? Then, they wouldn’t have to worry if one or two of them were destroyed by the rebels exploiting pesky little design flaws. Perhaps Drum has discovered yet another Star Wars plot hole that can only be covered up with a Chewbacca defense.

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