Yeah, this is not necessarily about games but, um… well, I actually don’t have a good excuse for posting this but come on — we have Mike Pottenger, an economist with a PhD in corruption and organised crime, breaking down exactly how much it would cost to be Batman. You need to be reading this right now! He claims that economics states that Batman is “not the solution to Gotham’s crime problem” and he makes some seriously compelling arguments!
In tallying up the cost of being Batman, I’ll take the Centives estimate that puts the cost of Alfred at $262,800. I think they’re understocking Batman’s batarangs and tactical explosives, so I’m going to go with what I see as a pretty conservative 30 batarangs and 10 tactical explosives (for distractions and quick escapes) per month. Add these to Alfred, round them off and you’re looking at about $300,000. Even this is overly conservative, as it doesn’t account for other expenses such as, for example, (1) the lavish parties that Bruce throws in order to play the part of the playboy millionaire socialite (2) fuel, ammunition and countermeasures for the various vehicles, not to mention replacements for those vehicles, (3)medical supplies, including high-tech knee braces that can cure limps, and (4) ongoing research and development of new gadgets, such as a giant supercomputer that can monitor everything and everyone all the time, a heavily armoured low-altitude jet, a bike with impractically massive tires, or a fusion reactor. Let’s be generous and assume that Bruce manages to do all this for no more than another $600,000, bringing the total cost of being Batman to around $900,000 per year.
So what is the opportunity cost of Batman? Well, to take one example, Peter Parker is a freelance photographer, who’d earn around $30,000 per year (this is the current US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate of the median salary of a photographer, and given that that’s for full-time photographers, not freelancers, it’s fair to assume Parker would be at or below the median). So the opportunity cost of one Batman is 900,000/30,000 = 30 Spider-Men. Gotham’s policy makers might well ask themselves which it is better to have. (Note: though a fair comparison should consider the setup costs of creating a radioactive spider to bite thirty Peter Parkers, I’ve had trouble finding even rudimentary data on this – I’m open to evidence that suggests this would be prohibitively more expensive than the set up costs of Batman.
According to Pottenger, while Batman would only have a negligible impact on Gotham City’s crime-rate the impact of Spider-Man, considering the fact 30 of them could be funded at the same cost of one single Batman, is far more cost-effective.
So, in short, having Batman doesn’t substantially increase the risks of being caught or the penalties if caught committing a crime. We shouldn’t, therefore, expect him to have much of an effect on Gotham’s crime rate (if anything, we should anticipate a spate of daylight crime as criminals substitute away from night-time crime after realising that Batman, like most monsters, mostly comes at night). And this just reinforces the importance of the opportunity cost of Batman noted above: assuming Spidey can catch as many crooks as Bats on a daily basis, thirty Spider-Men would net you 300 of Gotham’s 478 violent crimes per day. The thing is, although this is a much better deal for your superhero dollar,ultimately the money would be better spent improving law enforcement to stop the crims getting out once they are caught.
It’s pretty hilarious reading. You can check out the whole thing here.
Via Gizmodo
Leave a Reply