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The macroeconomics of Superman
Did you know about the new summer Superman film?
Let's say we had an altruistic and incorruptible Superman, how should he allocate his efforts to improve the macroeconomy? He is really strong, he can fly very fast, leap tall buildings at a single bound, has incredible vision, and somehow he is immune from Einstein's theory of relativity and time dilation at near-light speeds (his most impressive achievement, if you ask me).
Yes he should save the world from evil madmen, but fighting ordinary crime hardly appears worth his trouble. Criminals seek pure transfers, and Superman's policing doesn't lower our (inefficient) investments in locks enough to make a difference in the growth rate. It's about as silly as having Superman sub in for FedEx when the skies get crowded over Memphis.
And should his alter ego, Clark Kent, really be a photographer for a daily newspaper? At least that guy is contributing to a reproducible output; he must have read Sherwin Rosen's paper.
Darfur and the like aside, I have a few nominations for what Superman should do:
1. Become a research scientist.
2. Collect data for the Fed.
3. Fly around and tell people -- politely but very pointedly -- when they should accept lower nominal wages.
4. Perform amazing stunts on TV, become a big celebrity, and then preach the virtues of economic literacy; this is Dan Klein's suggestion.
Your thoughts? Your answer suggests much about where you see leveraged returns in today's world. By the way, here is the first edition of the Superman comicbook.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 7, 2006 at 05:35 AM in Film | Permalink
Comments
He should spend his non-work hours impregnating women, thereby enhancing earth's human capital stock. Hybrid vigor, itz.
Posted by: Tournament of Champions at Jun 7, 2006 6:58:30 AM
"really be a photographer for a daily newspaper?"
Clark Kent is a reporter. Jimmy Olsen and Peter Parker are photographers. ;-)
Posted by: Nathan T. Freeman at Jun 7, 2006 7:07:20 AM
Something for everyone. Fly to Iraq and defeat the "insurgents" - he'll need his X-ray vision
then build a wall at the Texas-Mexico border for the Texas Republican Party, then use his
vacuum breath to suck most {not all} of the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, then as he
has done many times in past adventures, fly around the Earth at superspeed reversing time to
2000, go to Florida and there "lean" on Katherine Harris and/or Anthony Scalia to do the
right thing and send George W back to baseball.
Posted by: Drew at Jun 7, 2006 7:12:15 AM
Tyler,
You are basically reproducing the question answered in "The Watchmen". Doc Manhattan is an analog for Superman.
Ideally, we could strap some magnet onto Superman's body, throw him inside a gigantic coil of copper wire and have him produce free electricity for a large portion of the world. At the same time, he could even use his heat vision to heat a large container of water, turn it to steam and produce even more electricity.
Posted by: Xmas at Jun 7, 2006 8:09:50 AM
"He should spend his non-work hours impregnating women, thereby enhancing earth's human capital stock."
There are some difficulties with this. Read "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex":
http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html
Posted by: Jacqueline at Jun 7, 2006 8:21:52 AM
He should bring asteroids to earth for resources, then serve as a low cost launch vehicle to get massive solar power stations into orbit which can beam energy to earth or wire the energy down along one of several space elevators (that he would also help construct). He could also move massive terraforming facilities to Venus and Mars to prepare them for eventual colonization.
Posted by: Mark at Jun 7, 2006 8:32:27 AM
Enforce property rights and the rule of law. If we're ruling out "ordinary crime," this means fighting "evil madmen" like Mugabe, Putin, Kim, Castro, and company.
Posted by: Eli at Jun 7, 2006 8:34:47 AM
It's interesting...Superman landed on Earth in America, and so our reference, and even above in the comments, is what can Superman do for us?
What if Superman had landed in Iraq and been raised by a muslim farmer and his wife? Would we still praise him, or would we fear him and be addressing the Superman problem? Would we even be concerned with what he could do for Economics?
That said, for all of Superman's great knowledge that was imparted to him either on his journey to Earth, or his Archtypical 'hero-developing' phase at the fortress of solitude between his teen years and adulthood, over the years, he has never really done ANYTHING for mankind except fight evil. His father was a judge, and all Superman does is put bad guys behind bars, in a sense carrying on the family profession here on Earth. Maybe we are giving that family a little too much credit. Honestly, isn't Superman just a self-contained justice system? Economics may be beyond his abilities (which makes sense because Superman and his family basically exhibit a guild-system approach to life).
So, appoint him to the Supreme Court or the World Court and have him do what he does best. Of course, he may have fled Earth if he was on the Supreme Court having to hear the Anna Nicole Smith case...and who could blame him?!?
Now, if you'll excuse me...up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....an ice cold martini!
Andy Martini
Flame Proof and Limousine Ready
Posted by: Andy Martini at Jun 7, 2006 8:46:27 AM
He should play for the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals.
Posted by: Matt at Jun 7, 2006 9:19:12 AM
I always thought Superman should open a construction company. He should be building tunnels, damns, bridges and the like. Just have enough people supplying the inputs and Superman can have the projects done in days.
It is very important that Superman understand economics, private property rights, very important that he is rewarded for his efforts. If he ever got upset, or disenchanted with doing good and started using force to get what he wanted, everyone would be in big trouble. He could enslave mankind and confiscate ordestroy all wealth. We'd all be looking to Lex Luthor for help then.
Posted by: scott clark at Jun 7, 2006 9:28:35 AM
He already does #3.
http://www.superdickery.com/dick/11.html
Posted by: k at Jun 7, 2006 9:38:37 AM
It says something about either me or the socio-technological underpinnings of our times, but I can't help but thinking that either Lex Luthor or Brainiac would have a greater impact that Superman, if they could be safely harnessed to the macro-economy.
The space-based uses of Superman are probably the best. There are a lot of good ideas out there blocked on low-cost launch technology. Carbon sequestration might also useful as an stopgap: grab up a few hundred thousand tons of surplus rainforest, fly it to a very cold, very deep chunk of ocean (ideally a subduction zone) , dump it, wash, rinse, repeat a few hundred thousand times. On the energy generation side, having him build core taps for generally-available geothermal energy is probably more efficient than either the solar satellite or "strap a big magnet to him" solutions.
Posted by: Dave at Jun 7, 2006 9:43:27 AM
He could stop the ocean levels from rising and help out droughts in other areas at the same time. The levees in New Orleans would have never broken either.
His comparative advantage is to prevent wealth destruction. To be most effective he needs a super villain who is mostly harmless but still scary enough to curb moral hazard.
Posted by: Macneil at Jun 7, 2006 10:17:06 AM
Clearly he should offer his services to the highest bidder. He could then not only exploit his comparative advantage (and using the efficiency of the price mechanism in his favour allows him not to have to figure this out; impresive computational skills not being one of his super powers as far as I know).
His earnings form the auctioning of his services he could then donate to some charity (through to ensure efficient alocation the charitiy should not be anounced beforehand).
Posted by: econgeek at Jun 7, 2006 10:20:22 AM
He might be able to enforce genuinely federal enclaves in which people could sort themselves by economic social preference (a la Nozick). A libertarian/no regs state one place; a crunchy, soft socialist in another; a voluntaristic uber Victorian moralistic state over there, etc. and guarantee that no outside government could interfere by threatening military action. How much the states screw themselves up would be left to the participants subject to the no torture/no genocide constraint.
Need I add that he could build appropriately high walls/barriers for states that want to limit all immigration? But he could also ensure that anyone who wanted to leave (no North Koreas) was free to do so.
Posted by: jn at Jun 7, 2006 10:49:16 AM
Strictly in economic terms (i.e. setting aside the non-economic moral issues) wouldn't he be doing pretty well to simply guarantee geopolitical stability?
Superman seems like he could, alone, be the deciding factor in any military conflict. So what if he said he would intervene in any military conflict against the attacker? It would be a strong enough deterrent that he would dramatically reduce the incidence of inter-state conflict, and so essentially remove all the conflict-based discounts applied in the global capital markets.
Posted by: Andrew Edwards at Jun 7, 2006 11:11:22 AM
I'm surprised no one has figured out the correct answer.
He should work with teams of scientists analyzing his own biology. The aim would be to develop super biotechnology so we can all be immune to injury and disease and fly to work every morning.
Posted by: Jason at Jun 7, 2006 11:25:47 AM
I think that the focus is being put on the wrong area. Superman could probably do the most good in terms of improving the overall macro economy not by the use of his powers but by gradually releasing some of his advanced Kryptonian technology. A few years ago (before Lex Luthor became president), Brainiac (or some version of it) was retconned as being Kryptonian rather than Coluulian and it struck a deal with Luthor to revitalize Metropolis by sharing his advanced technology. Think of the economic benefits of even faster computers, abundant sources of clean and practical energy, advanced medicine that not only cures maladies but improves the quality of life, etc.
Posted by: Thorley Winston at Jun 7, 2006 11:34:32 AM
Obey the law and offer his services on the open market.
Posted by: Michael Couvillion at Jun 7, 2006 11:50:35 AM
Strictly in economic terms (i.e. setting aside the non-economic moral issues) wouldn't he be doing pretty well to simply guarantee geopolitical stability?
"Superman of Westphalia". This ignores the costs of having rogue despotisms that don't have to fear external invasion. Under this scenario those costs are all contained to the populations of those despotic lands, but they don't disappear. Of course, preventing outward invasion may increase the risk to despots of internal resistance, so it might be a wash.
Posted by: Dave at Jun 7, 2006 12:06:06 PM
I've always loved Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" article.
Posted by: Brian Moore at Jun 7, 2006 12:47:00 PM
I also thought of Dr Manhattan in the Watchmen comics. There's no reason to think Superman is especially intelligent (as opposed to Dr Manhattan), so becoming a research scientist may not be all that useful an option. Perhaps he could become a very expensive and powerful bit of occasionally-available lab equipment? (This is similar to the proposals to have him become a bit of occasionally-available construction or space launch equipment.)
But we should also factor in what Superman enjoys doing. He's a reporter for the Daily Planet so he can hang out with the woman he loves, at least as much as for any other reason. He fights crime around where he lives because that's where he really wants to fight crime, right?
One interesting question is how, if you're so powerful nobody can check you, you decide what the right thing to do is. If you're human, you've got to realize that plenty of powerful people have done horrifying things in the name of some good principle or idea, and never realized that they were doing evil. How do you avoid that? It's not enough to just follow the rules of your tribe, right? Sometimes you end up doing ethnic cleansing, recapturing escaped slaves, or destroying whole cities controlled by rival tribes following that path.
Posted by: albatross at Jun 7, 2006 1:43:18 PM
Superman's very presence prevents nuclear missles from hitting anything that superman doesn't want them to hit. Simultaneously superman can do more damage than a nuclear weapon. Thus superman can prevent the danger of large scale nuclear war just by being around. Superman can take down any conventional army by himself.
Superman thus institutes a monoploy on military level initiation of force. This would allow every country to stop all military spending. It still makes sense to have a police force, and counter terrorism forces but a large military is useless.
Beyond that space exploration, and energy creation seem the biggest deals.
Posted by: Michal F at Jun 7, 2006 2:18:32 PM
A cycical view of Superman is in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in which Ronald Reagan gets him to blow up communist planes and get rid of Superman's buddy, Batman, who is causing a bunch of problems in Gotham. One of the more enduring storylines over the last thirty years has had to do with Superman's godlike powers and how easily manipulated he is because of his altruism. Batman derides him by calling him the boyscout, as he thinks Superman is naive and dangerous for trusting mankind so much that he can be manipulated by dictators (like Miller's caricatured Reagan character). Even when he's told as retreating from government, like he does in the Justice League Unlimited series, he still can't win, because then the US government perceives him and his team as a threat, which leads to several skirmishes. So, it depends on his loyalties. If his loyalties are to America, then you get Miller's vision of him, which is probably not as bad as Miller makes it out to be - basically he becomes national security, like Captain America and his team in the current Ultimates series. Or, if his loyalties are to mankind in general, then you get the Justice League Unlimited view, which creates problems with the US.
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Jun 7, 2006 2:29:07 PM
I suppose you could have him go back in time to the creation of the stock market. Invest a dollar. Come back and use the proceeds to pay off the national debt.
Taking the question seriously, it all depends on where the bottleneck occurs in our economy. It's certainly not cheap labor. I really don't think it's innovation anymore. Judging from the amount of time that people are willing to wait in traffic jams, I'm guessing that it's either land or access to land.
If Superman could increase the amount of quality land, that would be nice, but I'm not sure how to go about it. Improving access would be the next best bet. Looking at Phoenix and Las Vegas you have to believe that connectivity is the only thing that matters. He could build parabolic tunnels for capsule-trains connecting the major cities and from the exurbs to center city.
Posted by: jj mollo at Jun 7, 2006 3:04:28 PM
