Explaining Stagflation by using Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The World of Hyrule is a post apocalyptic land land where technology stagnates, commerce is curtailed, and an ancient evil sits in the background, preventing all progress. Sounds like Stagflation....

Upon playing The Legend of Zelda for a while (yes I know I am late to the game) I have realized that the whole premise of the game is a good metaphor for stagflation.  How?

To properly explain my observation, we need to know the basic premise of the game.  In the game, Calamity Ganon comes back and attempts to destroy the kingdom of Hyrule.  However, the destruction is incomplete and the only thing holding him back for the past 100 years is princess Zelda.  However, there is a real devolution in technology, and pretty much everything sucks.  Commerce is at a standstill, and the world is generally a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with monsters, machines that went haywire, and the standard of living is generally not how it used to be.  There was a general feeling that life used to be better in previous generation.

There actually a real-life example of this, and that example is Japan during the so called “Lost Decade” where there was a real crash in the Japanese Economy and standard of living.  We need to remember that like the Hyrule of Old, Japan used to be the second biggest economy that was “feared” throughout the world.  In the 1980s, US pop culture was really worried that “Japan is going to take over the world” since Japanese corporations were buying property everywhere.  Heck Even the movie Die Hard was set in Nakatomi plaza. 

However then the great calamity happened and all the central bank/ government induced boom finally crashed.  No matter what happens the central planners at the Japanese government cannot bring the same level of growth and prosperity that was Japan during the latter 20^th century, and the economy came to a grinding halt.  All thoughts of “Japan is going to take over the world” is gone, and Japan’s population has been shrinking as a side effect of this calamity, just like Hyrule. 

Enter in the central banks of the world.  Just like Princess Zelda, they are trying to stave off a great evil from destroying everything.  However the biggest differenced is that instead of a heroic princess sacrificing herself by fighting a great evil alone, the central banks actually created Calamity Ganon. 

Imagine a storyline where Princess Zelda actually created Calamity Ganon in order to become more powerful—she attempted to harness the power of Calamity Ganon in order to make technology and prosperity progress at a faster rate.  However, because prosperity and growth have a natural flow “evil princess Zelda” lost control and is now trying to hold at bay the monster that she created. 

We have an example of that, and it is the modern monetary system following what is known as MMT, modern monetary theory where central banks actually think they can control the economy to ensure continued prosperity.  However, economics are literally a force of nature, and controlling these cycles is literally like trying to control storm cycles or even gravity itself.  You can try, but the results may vary and what goes up must eventually go down.  These central bankers essentially created Calamity Ganon in order to increase “power” but they instead unleashed a more massive dark dragon that will inevitably come crashing down.  Any attempts to try and contain it will be like a lone princess trying to stem the tide by herself, and the result will be a kingdom full of monsters that the stalemate created.  It was better to not have created this monster in the first place, but since the monster is created, any attempts to hold it at bay will resemble the Hyrule depicted in Breath of the Wild.