The Galactic Empire Was Always Gonna Fail

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The Galactic Empire Was Always Gonna Fail<br>It is hard enough to centrally plan a nation. A galaxy far, far away would be a severe impossibility even for Sith Lords.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon<br>Jun 23, 2026

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About the Author

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. His forthcoming book, Better Not to Know: Why Knowing Less is Sometimes Best, is with Peter Lang Publishing. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland , Georgetown , and Towson University . He lives with his wife, a lawyer, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.

A new Star Wars film, The Mandalorian and Grogu , opened recently and early box-office tracking suggests it will post the worst opening weekend in the franchise’s history. Whatever one thinks of the film itself, the release is a useful occasion to revisit a question that has long puzzled me about my favorite movie and TV franchise: how was the Galactic Empire, on its own terms, supposed to last? The regime is depicted as a vast and disciplined machine spanning the galaxy, and yet it collapses with surprising speed once Palpatine and Vader are killed at the Battle of Endor ending with the destruction of the second Death Star. The standard explanations focus on the Rebellion’s heroism or the Emperor’s hubris, but, instead, I want to argue that there is a more interesting explanation, deriving from the insights of economics and political theory, namely that the Empire faced too many information and incentives problems to last long.<br>1. The knowledge problem<br>As the Nobel prize winning economist, Hayek, convincingly argued, the relevant knowledge in a complex economy is not and cannot be had by any individual or small group in a form that is usable, but is instead dispersed across countless individuals. What a specific moisture farmer knows about his crop and the local weather conditions, what a bounty hunter knows about apprehending people on their local planet, what a smuggler knows about routes and Imperial checkpoints, what a local official knows about which mining concession is productive and which is being skimmed. This knowledge is local, tacit, and ever-changing. No central authority can collect it, and any attempt to aggregate it for purposes of central planning removes the very details and context that made it useful in the first place. Markets, on Hayek’s account, work because prices aggregate dispersed information into signals that no individual planner had to, or could, compile.<br>The Empire is, by its own description, the government of a galaxy. It contains tens of thousands of inhabited worlds, each with its own ecology, economy, and political situation. There is no price system worth the name, with resource allocation set by imperial decree and enforced by the military. The relevant knowledge must thus climb the bureaucratic ladder to reach imperial officials who make the decisions. At each step, that information is filtered, smoothed, and edited for self-protection and presentation. And by the time it reaches the regional governors, not to mention Darth Vader and the Emperor, it has been shaped and distorted by the incentives of every official whose career depended on it being received positively. And the consequence of this information gathering process is that the Empire cannot reliably distinguish between projects that are working and projects that are quietly failing.<br>2. The incentive problem<br>In firms operating under competitive conditions, waste is disciplined because someone must, eventually, eat the costs. A construction company that pads its bids loses contracts. A defense contractor that delivers a defective product loses repeat business, or its share price reflects the bad news. Even government procurement is disciplined, to a degree in democratic societies, by inspectors general, journalists, election cycles, and rival agencies vying for the same budget. None of these conditions hold inside the Empire.<br>Just by example, there is a tendency among fans to attribute the Death Star’s destruction to a single design flaw, namely the thermal exhaust port that allowed a torpedo to reach the reactor core. The flaw is real–though admittedly placed there by a disgruntled engineer–and it was the product of a poorly incentivized grand project, along with weak incentives to placate workers and engineers, which mobilized a colossal share of the regime’s output, coordinates millions of contractors and laborers across the galaxy, proceeded without competitive bidding, without an independent budget authority, and without an auditing body that could challenge cost...