Why Superman Doesn't Take Over the World Read online

  Many incentives are direct, obvious. If Marvel starts a marketing plan offering you a $5 gift card if you buy the new Jessica Jones comic, sales of Jessica Jones are going to go up. It is a plain, old-fashioned incentive that leads to a predictable result. Direct incentives can be positive or negative. The case of the gift card is a direct, positive incentive. A direct, negative incentive might be, for example, if you are caught stealing a comic book from our store, we will paint you like Harley Quinn. Assuming such a threat is credible, it should stop most people from stealing. Direct incentives are easy to see. Where economists, the comic industry, everyday people, and even superheroes run into problems is when they face incentives that are not so straightforward.

  Indirect incentives are the unforeseen results that arise when circumstances change. These are often referred to as unintended consequences. For example, as governments raise taxes on cigarettes, the direct incentive is that fewer cigarettes are sold. Even for a product as addictive as cigarettes, if you raise the price high enough, people will stop buying them. (If you don’t believe this, go to New York to buy cigarettes. It may not get you to quit, but you will necessarily buy fewer of them. They are so expensive that buying a couple of packs could mean you don’t eat for the week. Remember, limited resources prevent you from having everything you want). The unintended results of these high taxes include more home-produced cigarettes. More insidious, though, is that these high prices make the black market more attractive not just for sellers but also for buyers. If you can buy cigarettes in Virginia for a third of the price and drive them a few hours north, you can make a fortune by selling them to desperate New Yorkers for less than they would pay at the local bodega. This means sales drop in New York, which they were going to do anyway but, more importantly, tax revenue for the Empire State falls. That’s not what was supposed to happen. With the combination of home growers and black market transactions, you may actually cause more smoking to take place in New York than before. Another possible side-effect of the high taxes is that people who want a chemically induced high, but find cigarette prices to be too prohibitive, switch to something else. Alcohol could be one thing but they might also move on to marijuana or some other illicit drug. At higher prices, the price differential between cigarettes and other drugs gets smaller. If they pack a bigger punch for each dollar spent, why not make the switch? The intention of raising cigarette prices is not to drive smokers from tobacco to cannabis, but that’s the power of incentives.3 People respond to them in predictable and unpredictable ways.

  So, what are the unintended consequences in origin stories? Let’s take another look at Bruce Wayne. He commits to fighting crime in Gotham to avenge his parents’ deaths. This obsession leads to many problems for Wayne in the future. He is borderline neurotic, has no real friends, makes questionable decisions regarding romantic prospects, and in Batman #1 (King and Finch, 2016) we find him examining his life choices by talking to himself and his dead parents, wondering if his life was lived well enough to make them proud.4 Bruce Wayne is a great crime fighter but he is a mess of a person. In fact, being a hero takes its toll on the people who have assumed the mantle. Personal relationships, if you have them, are at risk (see Chapter 2 on the burden of maintaining a secret identity). Physically, no matter what your healing factor, heroes take a pounding. Mentally too, there are scars. Deadpool, whose healing powers are so remarkable that he and Wolverine (who also possesses an overactive healing factor) regularly engage in gruesome battles where limbs are lost and more blood than a human could possibly possess is spilt, spends time walking through his own minefield of lost memories reminiscent of an Edvard Munch painting on LSD.

  You might say that this is a part of the job and you would be correct, but when it comes to starting life as a hero, the possible downsides are rarely presented. Probably the most significant example of the unintended consequences of understanding one’s new powers is Spider-Man (Lee and Ditko, 1963b). Bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter Parker wakes up with spider powers. He now has strength far out of proportion to his size and, in an underused technique for heroes, goes out to a local fight club to make some money. In the process, he allows a small-time criminal to escape. It turns out that this crook kills his Uncle Ben. The unintended consequence of doing nothing, when there was no real incentive to stop the thief other than it was the right thing to do, is the impetus for Spider-Man becoming the Web Slinger who protects New York City.

  Fame is yet another motivator, but there is a problem for heroes who rely on it as their incentive: sometimes that fame results in significant problems for others. The siren song of celebrity instigates the Marvel narrative Civil War (Miller and McNiven, 2007). At the beginning of the comic, we see a group of low-level heroes setting up to raid a villain’s safe house. These criminals have recently broken out of Ryker’s Island Prison and are on the lam. The catch is that the raid is being taped by a superhero-based reality show film crew. In order to raise ratings for the show, this group of third-rate heroes decides to go after a more capable group of miscreants. The raid begins well. Three of the four escapees fall quickly but the fourth is determined to avoid capture. Tracked to a bustling elementary school, Nitro, who can explode himself and reform at will, does what villains do. To enact his escape, he detonates himself, killing at least one of the heroes and hundreds of school children. In the pursuit of fame, there can be consequences. In the hero world, the unfortunate side-effect of doing your job can be devastating, a topic that will be explored in more detail in Chapter 7.

  What Makes You Happy?

  While many protagonists get their start because of the incentives they face to do good, others get into the hero game because they are searching for a cause. They are inspired by existing heroes, or they want to be part of the excitement of fighting crime and cleaning up the streets. Maybe they’re fed up with the bad guys running amok. Perhaps they are seeking adulation. Regardless, they want to be part of the pursuit of the criminal element because they think it will make their lives better.

  Enhancing our happiness is the motivation for a lot of what we do in life. There are, of course, things we’d rather avoid: paying taxes, colonoscopies, holidays with the odd family member. We realize that in neglecting these things there are potential consequences, so, while they may not be the most fun, we swallow hard and do them. But we all know that if we could get out of these things, we would. In a world of limited resources, we want to utilize those resources to make our lives better, not worse. In economics, we use a somewhat abstruse term for happiness that derives from one of the more esoteric characters in economic history. The term is utility. The man was Jeremy Bentham.5

  Utility is simply a measure of happiness. It is related to the idea of utilitarianism, which is probably most famous for the sop “the greatest good for the greatest number.” This means that policy and life choices should be focused on making as many people better off as possible. According to such a theory, taking all my money and giving it to you and your brother is a righteous act because it would increase the good of society; after all, more people are better off. Utilitarianism is therefore fraught with moral concerns. How ethical is it to steal from one group of people and give it to a slightly larger group? In some places, that is referred to as mob rule. As a result, utilitarianism is not that popular among governmental philosophies.

  Still, Bentham wanted to develop a way of making utilitarianism empirical so, being a good economist (well, maybe not a good economist, but at least a creative economist), he developed a unit of measure for happiness: the util. More utils means more happiness. According to Bentham’s version of utilitarianism, people should pursue utils like a bloodhound on the trail of a rabbit and over time economists reasoned that such actions make sense. Under the assumption of acting rationally, people will try to gain as many utils as they can. At first blush, this may sound a little crazy but, then again, if you think of utils as Pokémon then perhaps it isn’t so weird–you gotta catch ’em all.

>   The idea of utils forms the basis for determining how happy you are. The problem is, no one has ever seen a util, nor do we know how to compare utils between people. What is a util to you might not be anything to me. How many utils do you get by eating a box of donuts? What about the number of utils you get from watching My Little Pony? If Barry Allen returns from the Speed Force to reassume the mantle of the Flash does your util basket get bigger? It isn’t going to be the same for each person and in some cases what increases your utils might decrease mine. After all, Wally West might be the best Flash in your mind and were he to disappear into the Speed Force you might be worse off. And then the question arises, how much worse off are you? Are my gains from seeing the real Flash reappear greater than your losses from seeing a second-rate Flash be sucked out of the storyline where he belongs?6 This leaves economists in a bit of a conundrum: Are utils any good at telling us anything? In spite of this dilemma, the allure of being able to measure happiness remains. Economists say that rational people seek to increase their utility. We prefer to be happy than miserable; how we accomplish that is personal. In the case of costumed do-gooders, justice, revenge, power, and fun are all things that motivate heroes, but utility speaks to what satisfies them and, interestingly, some heroes realize that once their initial goals are met, they find that contributing to the good of all is more fulfilling than what was motivating them in the first place.

  Nevertheless, there are some heroes whose origin stories are intertwined with the utility they receive from fighting crime. They look around and see that no one is doing anything, so they put on a cape and get to work. After the first few escapades they realize they like what they are doing and so they keep at it. Oliver Queen, who started out as a famous archaeologist,7 had his origin story rewritten to make him a wealthy playboy who washes up on an island,8 where he learns to survive using his bow (which he had conveniently grabbed before being swept off his boat into the sea), and defeats a drug-smuggling ring.9 The action and adventure, coupled with a sense of doing the right thing, makes for quite a turn from his lecherous lifestyle.

  Luke Cage, also known as Power Man, is subject to experiments while in prison for a crime he did not commit. In a spate of comic book karma, a corrupt guard who wants Cage dead disrupts the experiment, causing Cage to develop unbreakable skin and super strength (Goodwin and Tuska, 1972). He escapes prison and returns to Harlem, where he hangs his shingle as a “Hero for Hire.” The comics depict Cage as hard-working but certainly not altruistic. He will help anyone as long as they can meet his price but, being a good guy at heart, he starts saving people gratis, which cuts into his income stream. Eventually he is put on the payroll of a group of heroes called the Defenders. Now with a regular paycheck, Cage can do something that helps others, thereby increasing his utility, and pay the bills.

  Wonder Woman falls into the category of a hero who leaves her home because of a desire to do something more with her life. Wonder Woman, known as Princess Diana by her country women, lived on an island inhabited by a female warrior race, the Amazons, that was protected from the world of men by the goddess Aphrodite. When a man washes up on the shores of Paradise Island, Aphrodite commands that one of the Amazons must be chosen to return him to America and remain there to fight war and evil. Princess Diana’s mother, the queen of the island, arranges a contest to find the worthiest Amazonian warrior, but prohibits the princess from participating. Diana dons a fairly transparent costume that amazingly befuddles the queen and wins the tournament. Her sense of honor intact, Diana heads to the world of men with the intention of helping America to win the war.10

  As we will discuss later, this idea of utility is also something that keeps people engaged in the never-ending fight over who is the greatest superhero (Chapter 10). But before we close this chapter, let’s take a look at one final issue that arises as ordinary people acquire superpowers.

  How Are You Going to Use Those Superpowers?

  Characters in hero comics are as often as not just people minding their own business when some seemingly random phenomenon transpires and sets them on a path to superpower stardom. Such accidents of fate are regular occurrences in the genesis of characters, be they scientific experiments gone wrong, acts of nature, or scientific experiments gone right. These accidents are kismet for some, a curse for others. Regardless of what the character thinks of their new reality, there is one inescapable and palpable certainty: their life is now entirely different.

  Take the Green Lantern, for instance. Hal Jordan was an Air Force test pilot,11 who as a child witnesses his father, also a test pilot, crash a plane and die (Broome and Kane, 1959). The brash, cocky, and at times entirely dislikable, Jordan follows in his father’s footsteps despite protestations from his family. By most accounts, Jordan is an exemplary pilot, despite being prone to taking risks—from which he always makes an escape. One fateful night, a member of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic, alien protection force, crash-lands not far from Jordan. The power of the dying alien’s ring draws him to find his replacement on Earth. While the job of galactic policeman might have intrigued the risk-loving Jordan, he certainly did not seek it out. Instead, it sought him. Jordan had no inclination to become a superhero, yet once he puts on the ring and feels the power associated with it, there is no turning back. In fact, Jordan becomes one of the most powerful Lanterns in the galaxy.12

  In the early Green Lantern comics, in spite of his newly acquired skills Jordan continues to work on Earth, being called away for various emergencies. Constantly off battling space villains and monsters in this early incarnation of the Green Lantern, the hero is rarely seen actually working, which begs the question: how does he keep his job? We’ll return to a possible answer to this question later.

  First, however, let’s consider the events surrounding the origin of the Flash. Barry Allen is a gifted, if perpetually tardy, crime scene investigator.13 In a fortuitous lab accident, Allen is doused with chemicals that are propitiously struck by lightning. When he wakes up he realizes that, yet again, he is going to be late for a date. He starts to run and discovers that he now has super speed. Already part of the police force, Allen announces that he will use his speed to help thwart crime (Broome and Infantino, 1959). As the story develops, we learn that not only can he run fast, but he can do everything fast, including collecting and processing evidence. Employing his speed, Allen continues to assist the police in fighting crime.

  Let’s also consider one more backstory before the economic lesson ensues. Wade Wilson was a troubled child. His mother died when he was young and his abusive father was murdered. The predictable course for Wade was that, after a very brief stint in the military, he ends up a mercenary (OK, that might not have been entirely predictable). At some point, he discovers he has cancer, the same disease that killed his mother. Desperate for a cure he agrees to participate in a study run by Department K, the Canadian government’s version of top-secret, sci-fi weapons development. He is given an experimental dose of healing factor that enables his body to rapidly regenerate after suffering any injury, including gun shots, knife wounds, amputations, and, apparently, cancer (funnily, these healing factors haven’t cured the horrible disfigurements he sustained while in the care of the Canadian government’s weapons program). Nevertheless, the healing factor, along with a tremendous amount of training with heroes and villains, makes Wade Wilson, now known as Deadpool, a lethal assassin. Deadpool, the “Merc with the Mouth”, may never shut up, but he gets the job done.

  So You’re a Hero Now? What Can You Do?

  Green Lantern, Flash, and Deadpool come to the position of hero in very different ways, but they have one thing in common: they are now more adept at their jobs then they used to be. In economics, we recognize that in order to become more productive, businesses and societies can follow several paths. According to economists, productive means how effective an input is at producing output. If you want to make more things, you can hire more inputs; put more workers on the factory floor, h
ire more programmers, hire 1,000 monkeys and place them at 1,000 typewriters.14 With more labor there will be greater output, but the quality may be questionable.

  Another way to increase productivity would be to improve the quality of the inputs. Technological innovation happens pretty quickly these days but staying on top of the latest and greatest can be expensive. Investing in capital does not happen overnight, and even when it is accomplished it might be that, due to the rapidity of technological change, your new robots, factory, or machinery are already out of date. A better option than capital accumulation might be to spend some resources on developing your labor force.

  Economists call this option human capital development and it is one of the most important avenues of economic advancement. Firms that want to get the most out of their employees cannot sit idly by, expecting their workforce to keep up with the pace of business. For productivity to continue, workers must improve their skill sets. Among other things, this is accomplished by achieving higher levels of education, job training, and on the job experience. Basic training for workers on how to utilize a computer can increase productivity in manifold ways. Think about how much more productive employees are when using the internet to communicate, or word processing software to type, as opposed to using fax machines and typewriters (and think about how much less work the monkeys would have to do if they had been trained to use Microsoft Word!). While important for blue-collar jobs, this is equally important for those who work in highly skilled areas. A doctor who doesn’t learn about new procedures and treatments for patients puts them at risk.