A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.

Even though Star Wars is easily read as feminist for its time - and even for now, with Princess Leia's role - people wouldn't make a movie like that in 2016, where the guys are mostly the tough ones, and the women aren't in positions of authority.

If you take anything that succeeded, just imagine it succeeding 10 years before or 10 years after, you could almost always make, with the same plausibility, the "it fit the times" argument.

A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.

It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

So, I subscribe to the following reading: Star Wars is an essentially Christian tale.