Ice and fire: what Game of Thrones can teach us about power politics
But the panel wasn’t there for TV criticism, and moderator Caleb Watney of the free-market R Street Institute quickly steered them on to the thorny question of why Westeros, the imaginary continent where the show takes place, has seemingly endured 8,000 years of economic stagnation.
“The last major economic development that we’re aware of us is the invention of steel when the Andals invaded about 6,000 years ago,” he said. “In the meantime [in the real world] we’ve invented driverless cars, 2,000 years after the invention of steel.”
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The second world war came up again when Watney asked whether Daenerys Targaryen, the “dragon queen” who has spent most of the series plotting to reclaim her crown, should have used her fearsome beasts to destroy the capital King’s Landing and instantly end the war, a potential strategy Watney likened to the US’s use of nuclear bombs against Japan.
