118: Zachary Feinstein on Systemic Risk and Economics in Star Wars and Harry Potter

Zachary Feinstein is Professor joined the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis in 2014.

While earning a doctorate at Princeton University, Zachary supervised the senior thesis-writing group and assisted in teaching several courses.

Previously, he conducted research at Hunan University in China and was an intern at Millennium Partners LP and Lehman Brothers Inc., both in New York City.

Professor Feinstein works in the broad fields of operations research and financial engineering and he heads The Operations Research and Financial Engineering Laboratory Washington University.

His research focus has been on the applications of set-optimization to financial risk measurement, with projects studying and defining dynamic risk measures in markets with transaction costs and measures of systemic risk.

You can find Professor Feinstein’s work on Star Wars and more at www.fictionomics.com.

On Systemic Crises and Contagion:

“This is something that comes up very regularly in modern economic history. And really it’s something that we talk about it for a year after the crisis and then we forget to think that this is a problem. So by bringing it up in Star Wars and by bringing it up in Harry Potter we can keep this in the public consciousness.” Professor Zachary Feinstein.

Economics:

In this episode, Zachary discusses and mentions: systemic risk, contagion, world GDP, Gross World Product, Gross Galactic Product (GGP), interstellar travel, economic stagnation, financial deregulation, resources, scarcity, bailout, bank failures, TARP, moral hazard and the Glass-Steagall Act.

In this Episode, you will Learn:

about the petition to White House to build the Death Star.

how the Death Star would cost $193 quintillion to build and World GDP is $70 trillion.

about how Professor Feinstein used the Manhattan Project to build the first Atomic Bomb as a proxy to calculate the cost of the second Death Star.

why people would go back to authoritarian rule like The First Order (economic depression).

how economic growth is linked to population growth.

what happens in a systemic crisis if it’s generated by currency exchanges.

the Economic System in the Star Wars Galaxy.

the systemic risk imposed by the Gringotts Bank in the Harry Potter series.

and much much more.

Movies/TV Series Mentioned in this Episode:

Writing Tips:

Just write it down. Get something on page and then afterward you can mark it up in red as much as you want. Don’t worry about getting the right sentence down, just get something on the page and then move it all around. Mark it up. Completely delete it if you want. But once it’s on the page, it’s much easier to move forward than worrying about the perfect sentence to start – Professor Zachary Feinstein.