Welcome to winter break. One of the great things about returning home is that your family and friends can share not only in the new, colorful personal habits that you’ve picked up on campus, but also in the fruits of the valuable analytic skills that you have developed here at Lawrence.
And what better way to get that conversation jump started than to break down which Bond villains had plans that actually made economic sense?
Economist Jean-Jacques Dethier gets us started. Here — right on schedule — is a taste of analysis of the evil scheme of one Christopher Walken in A View to a Kill:
Plot: Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) wants to secretly trigger a massive earthquake that will destroy Silicon Valley. This will then allow him and his investor allies to monopolize the microchip manufacturing market.
Plausibility: “As far as I know, microchips aren’t actually manufactured in Silicon Valley,” says Dethier. “They’re made all over the world, in China and other places, though the guys who commission the work may be in Silicon Valley.” Therefore, while taking out Silicon Valley would obviously be cataclysmic for the tech industry, he notes, it also wouldn’t entirely remove your competitors, and wouldn’t ultimately affect manufacturing that much.
Ah, pity Zorin didn’t commission a five-forces analysis.
Via the Cheap Talk blog.
UPDATE: Tyler Cowen has weighed in.