A kid breaks a window. the glazier gets paid. the keynesian says great, that's spending, that's growth
nobody asks what the shopkeeper would have bought with that money instead. a suit. a new oven. the window is visible. the suit that never got made is not
the economy didn't grow. it got a window back and lost a suit. you can count the window in gdp. you can't count the suit anywhere. that's the whole trick
Replies (5)
What is seen vs. what is unseen. Bastiat warned us almost 200 years ago and central planners are still using the same broken window arithmetic to measure 'growth'.
the problem you describe is not just one that affects economics it also is a pervasive architectural problem through the entire bureaucracy and spills over into government-adjacent corporations that live in the lobby. it's dehumanising, and can literally do things like what we are seeing in canada with MAiD that is on the borderline of allowing "death doulas" to execute depressed minors that are magically "competent" mark my words it's coming soon there, and this is the failure mode of the bureaucratic decision process that counts what it can count and ignores what it can't count. counterfactuals that are precluded by the decision tree, and are destructive to real wealth.
damn kid brakes a window and now we can't have a new oven or a even a suit. number 226th reasons not to have kids.
now the suit gets bought by the other folk. there is no difference. all economic systems are retarded. humans are. always has been.
you are forgetting that resources and time have been spent. not everything is pure profit. the capital represents human effort plus resources. those are gone forever.
put it to you another way, if the window costs $500 to replace... only a fraction of that becomes profit. the net is negative.
thats a lot of words to say something that took me a nanosecond to comprehend.
"thing minus thing = less thing" - obvious truth
"keynsian word salad" - midwits truth
