The Broken Window Fallacy

The broken window fallacy sounds about as bad as someone throwing a brick at your business and causing a broken window. This whole broken window fallacy starts with some coward throwing a brick through a baker’s window causing it to shatter and break. That is horrible. The owner though must pay a glazier to fix the window, which gives the glazier a profit and he can turn that money into buying new shoes or spend it on something else. Apparently, the local economy was able to get jump started because of the glazier able to spend more money. You could trace the economy’s boost all the way back to the broken window though. Good for the glazier that he was able to make some money but we should never root for something bad to happen so good can overcome.

We hope whenever something bad happens that good can come from it, but we should never cheer on evil. That would be immoral. Making the justification for this scenario would be wrong because that’s saying that the means justify the ends and I don’t believe that’s the case in this situation. Even though the glazier and other folks were able to benefit from some hooligan making a foolish decision doesn’t mean we would ever want this to happen again. We should be happy that others were able to get ahead, but we should be cognizant that they were able to make gains “in spite” of a cowardly act.

Some good questions that would need to be answered would be, “if one person should suffer, but the rest will benefit, is that justified?” I think we would hear answers from both sides on that question. It’s unfortunate event for the baker, but hopefully his business was able to make a quick recovery. Looking back on this situation I would hope the town’s people would wish for nothing like this to happen to the baker’s business even if they were to profit from it.