THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE HUNGER GAMES.

It remains a topic for research.  A disciple of Leon Trotsky, not surprisingly, finds missed opportunities and contradictions.

Granted that The Hunger Games is a book for young readers, a good deal of material, including Katniss’ reactions, is treated ham-fistedly. There is no question left open as to how Katniss feels at practically any given moment, and many passages end with a bare restatement of what has already been made obvious.

The world and the situation in which Katniss finds herself are ripe with possibilities for deeper commentary, but so many of those possibilities are dissipated as the reader or viewer becomes swept up in the steady piling up of corpses. No definite positions are taken on a great many issues.

The claim that The Hunger Games “is an action-packed ode to freedom that any small-government conservative will love” or “any Tea Party sympathizer should cheer” (Washington Examiner) is largely wishful thinking. However, the author’s confusion is perhaps summed up by this: on her list of favorite books, Collins includes Émile Zola’s Germinal, the 1885 novel centering on a French miners’ strike that socialist-minded workers hold dear, and Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s morbid tale about a group of boys stuck on a deserted island, meant to show the rottenness of human nature.

Collins and [director Gary] Ross have not sufficiently challenged themselves or their readers and viewers, and the results are correspondingly patchy.

Perhaps so, but the coexistence of a technically advanced ruling class with a backward and repressed working class defies the imagination.  Matt Yglesias (via Economics Education) attempts to provide the necessary imagination, but even he comes up short when the more advanced districts come up.

Collins wisely avoids going into detail about what life is supposed to be like in Districts specializing in luxury goods or electronics. It’s difficult to have a thriving economy in electronics production without a competitive market featuring multiple buyers and multiple sellers.

Absent market competition, personal computers never would have disrupted the mainframe market and the iPhone and Android never would have revolutionized telecommunications. Entrenched monopolists have no interest in developing new technologies that shake things up. It’s difficult to get real innovation-oriented competitive markets without secure property rights, and exceedingly difficult to have secure property rights without some diffusion of political power. That needn’t mean real democratic equality—a standard the United States and Europe didn’t meet until relatively recently—but it does mean fairly broad power-sharing, as the U.S. has had from the beginning.

Thus the mystery. These are the districts that provide the "Career Tributes". Imagine your worst nightmares about high school jocks and obnoxious Greek-letter organization members, but now vying for the honor of being chosen for the ultimate reality show. It is difficult to conceive of technically advanced districts producing jocks and frat rats, but without geeks and rebels.