Shiro Emiya and the Economy
Shiro Emiya in UBW is all about the hero who “saves one meaning not saving another.” In other words, when you choose to save one person, you lose your chance to save another person because there’s only so much you can do. It’s the limited resource constraint in economics.
There is no way we can save everyone. There is not enough resources for everything that everyone wants to do, if it is even possible to achieve it. The anime otaku is intimately familiar with this concept, simply because it takes a large amount of time to consume all the anime a real otaku would want to watch. There are limited numbers of minutes and seconds in a person’s life, after all. We have to drop some shows!
That is the basic criticism as seen here, as applied to economics. A unit of money spent in infrastructure project via taxation means a dollar of money not spent being invested in a private enterprise which may very well drive the same infrastructural development. Or maybe it’ll sit in some safe investment portfolio, not doing much. I’m not saying which way to spend the money is better than the other, but that there is a dichotomy. A sound fiscal policy doses both the pros and cons of a spending policy, as well as the pros and cons of an if-we-didn’t-spend-the-money-could-have-done-that policy.
A more relevant example than brick-chucking hoodlums can be seen in the video game resale issue that some are making things out to be. The scenario is, if you are unfamiliar, is that used game sales do cannibalize into new game sales especially as many people purchase new games and used games from the same store, where the same games, new versus used, are displayed in proximity for shoppers. While the marginal profit retailers make on new games are small to none, they make much more off used games, usually purchased from the very same customers, sold for credit. In order to try to get in on the used game action, publishers are trying a variety of things, but invariably at expense of customers of new games.
The “limited economics” reversal as applied to the used game situation is summed up simply here. TL;DR, it just means that because people trade in old games primarily so they can buy new games, by meddling with used game sales, it makes more expensive effectively for people who trade in games, and with that could mean fewer people buying new games as it raises the effective cost of new games.
I think in UBW, Shiro comes to terms with his ideal (borrowed, perhaps, from classical economists) both by trying to double that dollar, to save two birds with one projection magic. This way you traverse two alternatives at the opportunity cost of one. Then again there WERE two Shiros so that was a possible route, AMIRITE.
Shiro is oddly the strongest example of this principle that I’ve seen in all of anime/manga/games, and even so the stories themselves are fairly weak examples. Are there any better ones?
There are actually a lot of variations for this ideal. EMIYA (you know him simply as Archer) is the one who believes that “you save only what you can save”, which contrasts to what you say about UBW Shiro (save one, don’t save another). The most extreme variation would probably be Emiya Kiritsugu’s “kill a few, save the many”: a clear combination of the two Shiro’s variations.
Dude pic sauce artist?
Shance: I would say Kiritsugu’s is just wrong, because nobody argues with him on the bodycount, just on the long-term consequences. EMIYA and UBW Shiro are not really different; they are just on different evolutionary states of the same ideal. If anything Archer is already the extreme form of Shiro’s ideal. I see all three of these as you mentioned on the same scale.
@lelangir I believe it’s in that Saber art book with a bunch of saber pics. I linked to Akio Watanabe’s wiki entry for reasons unknown to me beyond that he is the illustrator credited here:
http://danbooru.donmai.us/post/show/406819/absurdres-adjusting_hair-ahoge-alternate_hairstyle
And I think in Kiritsugu’s case, he assumes much more about what will happen with the many than what both EMIYA and Shiro do. I think.