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> there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows. This is the core of the fallacy. There'd be more
by tombusby 9y ago
> there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows.
This is the core of the fallacy. There'd be more net wealth without breaking the window in the first place, leaving the guy free to spend that money on someone else's goods/services, who would cause the exact same amount of growth but you'd still have a window.
Spending that money that would have been spent replacing broken windows elsewhere may even generate jobs for the guys who are slack.
You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth. If you're saying the window is already broken, that's not the broken window fallacy.
- barrkel 9y agoI already said that the windows were already broken. And I explicitly said people who would be otherwise unemployed. It's like you didn't read what I wrote. And if breaking windows is a thing we value in society, then it wouldn't be a bad thing to go around breaking windows and continuously employ people to fix them up again. The reason I'm stretching it like this is to make "broken windows fallacy" fit fidget spinners and other fads, because that's what's needed to make the analogy work. (You know, the actual topic.) You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth I never said you could. People can, however, increase their wellbeing by consuming wealth, and a cycle of consuming wealth and producing wealth is not a waste of time; if breaking windows was beneficial to wellbeing, then it wouldn't be a waste of time to continuously cycle between breaking and repairing windows. Don't forget that wealth isn't a terminal value anyone is interested in; wellbeing (aka utility) is.
- bbernoulli 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scheme_for_Full_Employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scheme_for_Full_Employment
- tombusby 9y ago"What a genius idea" - Lord Keynes