The broken window fallacy is a classic hurricane-season misstep. “Hurricanes may do damage”, the reasoning goes, “but look on the bright side. Think of how many jobs will be created because of the destruction. Think about all the demand that will be stimulated. Things may look bleak, but this is actually good for the economy.”
Bastiat debunked this reasoning in his 1848 essay “That Which Is Seen and that Which Is Not Seen“, and countless economists since have echoed his remarks. In the essay, he tells the parable of a shopkeeper whose careless son breaks a window, and he asks the reader whether this is good for the economy. At first glance, it’s tempting to say yes. But as Bastiat shows in the story, this conclusion ignores the unseen effects of the broken window.
“If … you come to the conclusion,” he writes, “as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, ‘Stop there! your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.'”
What is not seen, briefly, is the lost opportunities, the things that could have been done with our resources had they not been needed to replace the broken window. Taking those into account, it becomes clear that the broken window is harmful to the economy. After all, there is now one less window in our stockpile of goods.
The same reasoning applies on a larger scale. There may be plenty of jobs and demand when a hurricane destroys a town, but saying this is “good” for the economy is simply wrong. If this logic were true, the more destruction we experience the better off we’d be! But economic reasoning — and plain common sense — tells us this can’t be right.
Patrick Carroll, “3 Economic Fallacies to Watch Out for during Hurrican Season”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2022-09-30.
January 5, 2023
QotD: The Broken Window Fallacy
January 4, 2023
QotD: Hate speech
However he who will attend to the motions of his own mind (to use Doctor Johnson’s wonderful, but sadly disregarded, formula for real and searching self-examination) will discover that hatred is by far the most powerful and durable of political emotions. One’s feelings for one’s political enemies are warm and lively, while those for one’s political friends are cool and torpid. It is obvious that the rich and the foreigner are in general hated much more than the poor and the fellow-countryman are loved; while hatred of oppression is much stronger than love of freedom, especially when it is other people’s freedom. To hate injustice is easy, to love justice, or even to know what it is, is difficult. Hatred, in short, makes politics, and much else besides, go round; and while Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, he might just as well have spoken of the hatred caused by small differences.
Nor is hatred exhaustible. On the contrary, it is indefinitely expandable. It often increases with its own expression, becoming more virulent with every word uttered; it is not a fixed quantity like fluid in a bottle. It is very easy, as most people must surely know, to work oneself up into a fury of indignation and insensate rage merely by dwelling on some slight or humiliation. Above all, hatred is fun: it gives a meaning to life to those who otherwise lack one.
The idea therefore that hate speech can be banned, is of course, is a sign of impatience with the intractability of the human condition. It wants to legislate people into kindness, decency and fellow-feeling. It appeals to the sort of people who forget (or never knew) that supposed solutions to human problems frequently throw up further problems that are greater than that which the solution is designed to solve. For its protagonists, it has the advantage of creating a bureaucracy of virtue with pension arrangements to match.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Hating the Truth”, The Salisbury Review, 2011-06.
January 3, 2023
QotD: Spartan dominance over the Peloponnese
The core of this control lasted until 371, when Spartan defeat at the Battle of Leuktra shattered this control. Epaminondas, the Theban commander, used the opportunity to free the helots of Messenia and reform them into a polis to provide a local counter-weight to Sparta, while Arcadia and Elis split off from Sparta’s alliance to form their own defensive league against Sparta and, to top it off, a number of the perioikic communities – including the Spartans’ elite light infantry scouts, the Skiritae – along with various borderlands also formed the new polis of Megalopolis on the northern Spartan border – it promptly joined the Arcadian league (this polis would later give us the historian Polybius; his anti-Spartan stance comes out clearly in how he treats Cleomenes III). Sparta, surrounded now by hostile poleis who had once been allies, would spend the rest of Antiquity as a political non-entity, save for one brief effort to restore Spartan greatness in the 220s, crushed by the Macedonian Antigonids who were in no mood to entertain Spartan delusions of grandeur.
We might then say that Sparta is successful – though not entirely so (Argos!) – in establishing a hegemony over the Peloponnese, but only maintains it for c. 175 years. That’s not a bad run, but for the record of a larger state dominating its backyard, it is not tremendously impressive either.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
January 2, 2023
QotD: Academic incentives and the Bobo lifestyle
[…]
Here again, academia provides the answer. But first, let’s talk about David Brooks, the “conservative” infamously aroused by Obama’s perfectly creased pants. There are few sillier people than David Brooks, but “take wisdom where you find it” is my motto (well, that and “mihi dare vinum“), and he really knocked it out of the park with Bobos in Paradise. No, seriously. […] A Bobo, in other words, is a Gen Xer who could compete with the Boomers on their turf … but since he also took the Boomers at their word when they went on (and on and on and on and on) about Sticking It to the Man (an all too common generational failing), the Bobo sees the Boomer’s luxury car / vacation home / trophy wife conspicuous consumption as unbearably gauche. So instead, the Bobo spends $500 on a can opener because it’s good for the environment or is handcrafted by paraplegic Brazilian Eskimos or something, anything, so long as it a) obviously costs a shitload, and b) has some kind of Save-the-World rationale attached to it.
Academia reinforces this. Lots of Gen Xers went into the ivory tower for precisely that reason. Y’all know that the average professor hauls in nearly $200 large, right? The median income for an American worker in 2019 was approximately $46,800. I was in History, not math, but even I can see that the eggheads take home over four times what the average Joe makes. Which sets up another lifestyle contest. When you’re a) richer than sin, b) surrounded by a caste on slave wages, and c) ideologically committed to seeing yourself as The People’s Champion, the only way out is to live Bobo-style. Sure, sure, I have a $500 can opener … but Maricela the cook is really empowered by using it, because it was made by transgendered aborigines Of Color.
And since those Bobos are middle aged now, they’ve indoctrinated two generations of students with this garbage. And those two generations also came up with social media, so now you’ve got the heady combination of lifestyle and persona striving. That’s why the DC crew do what they do. Competitive #wokeness is the only way to go … and since they’ve got their $400-manicured mitts on the levers of power, we all get to be the bit players and stagehands in the big Broadway show that is their special unique wonderfulness.
Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.
January 1, 2023
QotD: The amazing economic impact of mobile phones in the developing world
We also know why too. Being able to contact people means that markets complete, contracts and transactions are possible. It’s no longer necessary to near randomly meet someone physically in order to be able to organise a transaction. Thus more transactions happen – the value added in voluntary transactions being that GDP which is increasing.
Tim Worstall, “Mobile Phones Cut The Murder Rate – For the Same Reason They Grow The Economy”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-30.
December 31, 2022
QotD: Casual (aka slobby) clothing at the airport
Indeed, if there is one thing that unites mankind today it is casual slobbery in dress. This is rather odd, considering that so many people seem to spend a lot of their spare time shopping for clothes. The fact is, though, that however much time they spend on shopping, they will always look just as much a mess as ever. They choose, but they do not discriminate. Our unwillingness, and increasing inability, to dress elegantly represents the triumph of self-esteem over self-respect. We dress to please ourselves, not others, and not looking like a slob takes effort, especially keeping it up through the day. Convenience is all, and it is easier to throw on a few casual clothes than to dress well.
What sparked Dalrymple’s ire was his experience at a couple of airports:
Sitting in two airports last week, in Paris and Riga, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not seen a single person who was smartly, let alone elegantly, dressed.
Now I seldom disagree with Teddy about much, but I do on this occasion. Imagine this scenario:
You get dressed to go to an important business meeting, so you do it properly: ironed shirt, tie, decent navy-blue suit, leather belt and shiny black lace-up Oxfords. You check yourself in a mirror and damn, you look good.
But did I mention that the important business meeting was out of town, and you’d need to catch a flight there?
Now go back and reflect how difficult it’s going to be when you’re confronted by the surly TSA apparatchiks at the airport. Belt? Take it off. Shoes? Unlace them, and take ’em off. Jacket? Run it through the X-ray. And that gold tie-clip? We’re going to pat you down and run you through our Magical Cancer-Generating Full-Body Scanner, bub.
All of a sudden, a tee shirt, sweatpants and slip-on moccasins make a lot more sense, don’t they? And the net result is that you look like a slob, because it’s a big enough chore to dress properly in the first place without having to do it all over again at the airport in front of hundreds of people.
Kim du Toit, “Slobbery”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-09-06.
December 30, 2022
QotD: If AT&T had used the Google model
Guess what? That still may happen. The only reason Apple hasn’t already started force-feeding ads on your iPhone is a fear that competitors may not do the same — and they might lose a few market share points. But all it takes is one backroom meeting of dubious legality between smartphone providers, and you will soon start hearing a pitch from the GEICO gecko before you even say hello.
Ted Gioia, “YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (or More) Unskippable Ads in a Row”, The Honest Broker, 2022-09-19.
December 29, 2022
QotD: That foolish optimism of the early days of the internet
Those we call the left were sure that the internet would help democratize American society by opening the floor to marginalized voices. The people we call the right were sure this new medium would follow the pattern of talk radio. Free of progressive control, normal people could challenge the opinions of the liberal media. The internet was going to be an open debating society that worked on democratic principles.
Thirty years on and people old enough to remember the before times think that maybe the internet was a mistake. Giving a platform to millions of talking meat sticks, banging away at their phones, has just made life noisy. Worse yet, the range of allowable opinion has become much narrower. We now live in an age of censorship that was unimaginable before the internet.
The Z Man, “Coercion and Consensus”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-09-25.
December 28, 2022
QotD: Collective guilt
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946.
December 27, 2022
QotD: Pedantry
I suppose one is either born pedantic or not, though of course there are different degrees of pedantry. Just as one may be mildly or cripplingly obsessional, so one may be slightly or fulminatingly pedantic. I daresay that one day neuroscientists will put pedants in scanning machines and discover the part of their brains that lights up when they discover an error in a text, and then claim that they have found the pedantry center in the brain.
Theodore Dalrymple, “To Err Is Human, to Detect Divine”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-01-19.
December 26, 2022
QotD: Christmas gluttony
Brain: THERE’S STILL CHEESE LEFT, PUSSY!
Body: But I hurt.
Brain: EAT MORE CHOCOLATE NOW!
Body: *cries*
Brain: WASH IT DOWN WITH A PINT OF BAILEYS.
Body: I’m begging you. Please stop.
Body: SNORT THAT PURPLE QUALITY STREET, BITCH.Amanda (Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2018-09-13.
December 25, 2022
QotD: The best thing about Christmas
Amanda (Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2021-12-24.
December 24, 2022
QotD: Auberon Waugh on Christmas shopping
Auberon Waugh, Diary, 1975-12-18.
December 23, 2022
QotD: Wokeness as a lifestyle
For Gen X, think of my personal candidate for “everything that’s wrong with the 90s, all in one place,” the 1994 movie Reality Bites. Don’t rent it unless you’re current on your blood pressure meds. It’s four of the 1990s’ most insufferable people (Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo) quipping about being slackers. Well, except Stiller (also the director), who plays the grasping, uptight, sold-his-soul-to-The-Man yuppie foil to the other three. Stiller is the Gen Xer who chose to compete in the oversaturated career arena; he’s cartoonishly evil. The rest of them hang out in coffee houses, polishing their image. They’re lifestyle competitors.
For Millennials, and whatever we’re calling the upcoming generation (“The Lobotomized Snowflake Posse” is my suggestion, brevity be damned), well, just look at social media. Even lounging-around-Starbucks lifestyle competition is out of reach for people who went $100K in the hole for a Gender Studies degree. The only currency they’ve got is effort — hey, didn’t Karl Marx say something about that? — so Twitter becomes their full time job. Xzhe with the most followers wins.
Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.
December 22, 2022
QotD: Sparta as the pre-eminent foe of tyranny
It also matters exactly how tyranny is understood here. For the ancient Greeks, tyranny was a technical term, meaning a specific kind of one-man rule – a lot like how we use the word dictatorship to mean monarchies that are not kingdoms (though in Greece this word didn’t have quite so strong a negative connotation). Sparta was pretty reliable in opposing one-man rule, but that doesn’t mean it supported “free” governments. For instance, after the Peloponnesian War, Sparta foisted a brutal oligarchy – what the Athenians came to call “The Thirty Tyrants” – on Athens; their rule was so bad and harsh that it only lasted eight months (another feat of awful Spartan statecraft). Such a government was tyrannical, but not a tyranny in the technical sense.
But the Spartan reputation for fighting against tyrannies – both in the minds of the Greeks and in the popular consciousness – is predicted on fighting one very specific monarchy: the Achaemenids of Persia. […] This is the thing for which Sparta is given the most credit in popular culture, but Sparta’s record in this regard is awful. Sparta (along with Athens) leads the Greek coalition in the second Persian war and – as discussed – much of the Spartan reputation was built out of that. But Sparta had largely been a no-show during the first Persian war, and in the subsequent decades, Sparta’s commitment to opposing Persia was opportunistic at best.
During the late stages of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta essentially allied with Persia, taking funding and ships first from the Persian satrap Tissaphernes and later from Cyrus the Younger (a Persian prince and satrap). Sparta, after all, lacked the economic foundation to finance their own navy and the Spartans had – belatedly – realized that they needed a navy to defeat Athens. And of course the Persians – and any Spartan paying attention – knew that the Athenian navy was the one thing keeping Persia out of Greek affairs. So Sparta accepted Persian money to build up the fleets necessary to bring down the Athenian navy, with the consequence that the Ionian Greeks once again became subjects to the Persian Empire.
Subsequent Spartan diplomatic incompetence would lead to the Corinthian War (395-387), which turned into a nasty stalemate – due in part to the limitations of Spartan siege and naval capabilities. Unable to end the conflict on their own, the Spartans turned to Persia – again – to help them out, and the Persians brokered a pro-Spartan peace by threatening the Corinthians with Persian intervention in favor of Sparta. The subequent treaty – the “King’s Peace” (since it was imposed by the Persian Great King, Artaxerxes II) was highly favorable to Persia. All of Ionian, Cyprus, Aeolia and Carnia fell under Persian control and the treaty barred the Greeks from forming defensive leagues – meaning that it prevented the formation of any Greek coalition large enough to resist Persian influence. The treaty essentially made Sparta into Persia’s local enforcer in Greece, a role it would hold until its defeat in 371.
If Sparta held the objective of excluding Persian influence or tyranny from Greece, it failed completely and abjectly. Sparta opened not only the windows but also the doors to Persian influence in Greece – between 410 and 370, Sparta probably did more than any Greek state had ever or would ever do to push Greece into the Persian sphere of influence. Sparta would also refuse to participate in Alexander’s invasion of Persia – a point Alexander mocked them for by dedicating the spoils of his victories “from all of the Greeks, except the Spartans” (Arr. Anab. 1.16.7); for their part, the Spartans instead tried to use it as an opportunity to seize Crete and petitioned the Persians for aid in their war against Alexander, before being crushed by Alexander’s local commander, Antipater, in what Alexander termed “a clash of mice”.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
