Jurrasic Park
In 1993, millions of people around the world read Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park or saw the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name. Interestingly, most of them thought the story was about dinosaurs. But Jurassic Park was really all about international political economy.The story of Jurassic Park, for readers who somehow missed the movie or the media blitz, is about a biotechnology firm that discovers how to recover dinosaur DNA from amber-entombed prehistoric blood-sucking insects. The company takes over an island off the coast of Costa Rica and creates a theme park filled with real live dinosaurs that have been cloned from the dinosaur DNA. Soon, however, the dinosaurs get out of control and kill nearly everyone (except the kids, of course) and the Costa Rican air force comes to bomb the island back into the Jurassic Age, killing all the dinosaurs, except maybe Barney and a few other escapees, just in case Jurassic Park II is ever produced. You can see why people would become confused about this story and mistake it for a tale of dinosaurs. It really is about IPE, however (this is clearer in the book than the movie, admittedly). It really is about the fundamental tension and dynamic interaction of states and markets on . . .
Of course, Jurassic Park was a much more expensive attraction than Disney World, so these gains would have been concentrated among the world's wealthiest 1 percent. Why did the biotechnology company choose to make dinosaurs instead of more useful items, like life-saving drugs? The answer, made clear in the book, is that the prices of high-tech drugs are regulated by the government in an attempt to control medical costs and make the drugs available to a wide group of users. Of course, a less developed country was chosen because its government was unlikely to impose many regulations on what happened on the island. Who stood to benefit from Jurassic Park? Most people who are asked this question about Jurassic Park see an uneven pattern of gains. This is one of three important perspectives on IPE that we will discuss in upcoming chapters, and it is the right answer to the question cui bono? under many, but not all, circumstances. Some LDCs are suspicious that foreign investment generates one-sided gains and ends up exploiting the country, its people, and natural resources. Also, Costa Rica was chosen because of its climate. Why was Jurassic Park built in Costa Rica? It surely wasn't the case that the Costa Ricans were the park's target market. Who really benefited from Jurassic Park? If you apply Michael Crichton's ideas, you must answer that the real gainers were Crichton, Spielberg, and the investors who backed the book and the movie that so many people paid so much money to read or view. Costa Rica stood to gain a bit, due to the foreign investment and jobs that the theme park would have created (in the end, however, they certainly lost from the dino-disaster). They would have gained just as visitors to Disney World gain. Rather, Costa Rican citizens provided relatively inexpensive labor. The rich American, European, and Japanese visitors to Jurassic Park would have gained.
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Acceptance Essays
