The Broken Window Fallacy

Here’s an excellent (and short) video of Tom Palmer discussing the Broken Window Fallacy (HT: Steve Horwitz). It’s a venerable fallacy, but it’s one from which I hope we might be recovering. A couple of quick Google searches couldn’t turn up anyone saying that the recent earthquake in Haiti will be good for Haitian economic growth.

I had a Mises Daily a few years ago on the fallacy. Bastiat inspired Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, which I discuss here. Here’s a series of interviews with economists on different parts of Economics in One Lesson.

Cross-Posted at the Mises Blog and Division of Labour.