After months of delving into unemployment, real estate, health care, and financial markets, EconomyBeat finally gets to the heart of the matter with this post, asking the question:

Does Superman really need the rest of the Justice League?

The answer can be found in Ecocomics, where “economics and comic books collide.” The site is devoted to examining economic principles represented in comic books storylines.

On the question of Superman and the Justice League, we find the answer in a post called The Justice League and Comparative Advantage.

When you think about it, Superman doesn’t need the rest of the Justice League.

In conventional wisdom, every member of the Justice League has a particular strength. Green Lantern can handle weird and alien threats. Aquaman can talk to fish. The Flash can handle armies of lightly armed minions in a heartbeat. Wonder Woman usually takes point on mystical threats. And Batman is the World’s Greatest Detective.

If we consider each of those types of crime-fighting an output, we see that each member of the Justice League is a uniquely skilled producer of that output. Sure, Batman can beat up henchmen almost as well as the Flash can. But Flash can do it better. If Batman specializes in detective work, and Flash specializes in henchman-stomping, the two of them produce more Justice on net than if one tried to do both.

But what if we bring Superman into the equation?

Superman’s slower than Flash (only just), but his super-strength and invulnerability make him better at dispatching minions. He’s more capable of dealing with aliens than Green Lantern. And with his X-ray vision and super-hearing, you could make the case that he’s a better detective than Batman.

So why does Superman need the rest of the Justice League?

For that, we turn the pages back to 1817 and the principle of comparative advantage, as publicized by economist David Ricardo. Comparative advantage dictates that, even if one agent can produce two types of goods more efficiently than another agent, it benefits both parties for the efficient agent to specialize and trade for the other.

Ricardo gave the mundane example of a trade between England and Portugal in wine and cloth. Portugal could produce both wine and cloth more cheaply than England could. However, Portugal would benefit more from producing wine and trading with England for cloth, rather than trying at autarky…In fact, both Portugal and England would benefit more – the “global” production of both wine and cloth increase.

Bringing it back to comics, let’s say the Justice League wakes up tomorrow to two threats on their table:

1) A number of spatial anomalies have cropped up in Earth’s orbit; and
2) A number of Sun-Eaters are approaching Earth.

And let’s say everyone is out on vacation except Superman and Green Lantern.

It takes Green Lantern 8 hours to dispatch a Sun-Eater and 6 hours to close a spatial anomaly. It takes Superman 4 hours to do either.

Scenario One: Superheroes Refuse to Trade

	Sun-Eaters Dispatched	Spatial Anomalies Closed
Green Lantern	2	1
Superman	3	3
Total	5	4

Scenario Two: Green Lantern Closes Spatial Anomalies and Superman Dispatches Sun-Eaters
Sun-Eaters Dispatched Spatial Anomalies Closed

	Sun-Eaters Dispatched	Spatial Anomalies Closed
Green Lantern	0	4
Superman	6	0
Total	6	4

It’s a slim margin, but the Justice League can dispatch one extra Sun-Eater by letting Superman specialize – even though Supes is objectively better than GL at handling both threats. And since letting even a single Sun-Eater through spells trouble for Earth (it does eat the Sun, after all), it’s a profitable decision.

So maybe Superman is better at everything the Justice League does than any given member. But that doesn’t mean he can get by without them. He operates best as a floating agent, filling in where any team needs help and letting the specialists do the rest. This maximizes the output that the Justice League specializes in – Justice.

Other posts include “Why Can’t There Be Two Captain Americas?“, “Does Spider Man Have Mental Health Insurance“, “Is Batman’s Lifestyle Too Unrealistic” (nah), and “Are Vampires Good for the Economy?”

Michael Ian Black seems to think so. In his book, My Custom Van, he argues that cape manufacturers, garlic farmers, coffin makers, and angry villagers (by this he means suppliers of tools such as torches, spikes and crosses) would see net growth. Furthermore, he discusses the notion of a “vampire tax” or the idea that vampires would be more likely to attack individuals of lower socioeconomic backgrounds, who have less adequate means of protecting against an attack. This, he argues, would serve to reduce spending on social welfare programs, such as Medicaid, since more lower-income individuals enroll in these programs.

Although he predicts net losses to the makers of fake plastic and wax vampire teeth as well as the travel and tourism industries, he concludes that a small to moderate vampire army would be beneficial for the economy in the long-run and offset any potential short-run losses.

…there are other industries that have the potential to grow. One is, of course, the insurance industry. Much like with supernatural disaster insurance, people will want compensation in the event of vampires destroying their homes, their cars, and most of all, their pets. And what about insurance against actually becoming a vampire?

And then there are the comments by the site’s readers. The post “Comic Characters Occasionally Recognize Limited Means” drew two responses:

I wonder if a possible explanation for the unrealistic wealth of comic books’ richest people could be found in subtler differences in the economies of their worlds. Perhaps worlds with vibranium, super-geniuses, multiple artificial intelligences, contacts with advanced extraterrestrial societies, etc, are much richer than our own, in a way that would explain why their ultra-wealthy people seem to be wealthier than our Buffets et al.

Of course, they are still worlds where society is recognizably similar to ours, and where the average standard of living seems to track ours, despite their huge technological advances, so they are also likely to be much more unequal.
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To be fair to the X-men, they do have a significant source of off planet financing, since a sizable amount of their “modern” tech comes from the Shi’ar.

That’s clearly fallen off quite a bit with all the chaos in space, so it’s not surprising that they’ve suddenly discovered harder limits to their funding.

Yeah, and here’s another possible explanation…

It’s a comic book.

Posted on February 22, 2010 at 1:22 pm
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