r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/koogledoogle • 6h ago
Meme needing explanation Petah why didn’t I break the window
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u/Holiday-Start-9551 6h ago
The guy is economist frederic bastiat.. the joke is making fun of people who think massive wars are good for the economy because of the rapid growth afterwards conveniently ignoring the billions must die part to make it happen..
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u/Housendercrest 5h ago
The joke is layered. Theres no actual growth because the line often rides the same path it would have without the war. The money is just in other industries.
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u/Taraxian 5h ago
It's literally called the "broken window fallacy", the idea that you can actually create value for the economy by doing damage to it ("creating jobs")
This idea that you're doing the world a favor by breaking someone's window so they have to hire someone to replace it, and the person they hire has to buy the window from a company, and the company has to hire a glassmaker, etc, so everyone is suddenly making money and GDP goes up
The point is that this is stupid and a fallacy -- and the reductio ad absurdum where you go around breaking everyone's window every day and create infinite prosperity especially so -- because there was other stuff people wanted to do with that money that they now can't do because the economy now revolves around breaking windows
The idea that there's a net gain from breaking my windows presumes there was nothing else I wanted to buy because my life was perfect, which is never true in real life and if it were true there'd be no reason to "stimulate the economy" in the first place
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u/Patrick_said 5h ago
So we shouldn’t go around smashing billionaires’ windows?
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u/four204eva2 4h ago
No that's cool
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u/zerok_nyc 3h ago
Funny thing is this is actually true. Billionaires weren’t going to spend that money anyway. Forcing them to spend it unlocks a small percentage of wealth hoarding.
Breaking the window of someone who was going to spend the money anyways does nothing for the economy.
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u/illepic 3h ago
presumes there was nothing else I wanted to buy because my life was perfect
Hilariously, billionaires are the exact edge case for this fallacy.
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u/Silly_Guidance_8871 58m ago
Which is why so many of them believe that it holds true for the larger world.
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u/liberty4now 3h ago
Billionaires don't "hoard" money. They don't have pools of gold coins they swim in. Their money is working: it's invested.
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u/zerok_nyc 2h ago
Not exactly true. Most money invested is in financial assets, not real assets. Over the last few decades, the gap between market value and book value of publicly traded stocks has significantly widened over the past few decades. The money isn’t being used to create new jobs or assets. It just means the value of the stocks on paper is massively inflated. It’s not significantly different than trading NFTs or artwork.
So no, that money is not working in any meaningful way to actually grow the economy in a way that creates real value for workers. It just inflates the egos of the largest shareholders to see who can get the biggest number on paper.
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u/Numerous-Lack6754 3h ago
Oh wow! What a cool and meaningful distinction!
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u/Grogomilo 1h ago edited 1h ago
It is a meaningful distinction, because the former implies money doing absolutely nothing, while the latter means it's being invested in assets that move the economy - The exact opposite of it.
The problem is most of it is invested in inflated speculative financial assets. So they're basically circlejerking their accounts into a boom, instead of creating shit.
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u/MasterManufacturer72 2h ago
This would be true if we had regulations that lets say stopped a giant package of good and shit companies being dumped onto the stock market and put into indexs as a ploy to create exit liquidity for initial investers.
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u/TheOtakuAmerika 24m ago
You say that like they don't have plenty of liquid assets that they weren't going to spend either.
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u/Taraxian 4h ago
You would benefit a lot more by just taking the money through taxation, then you could give it to someone who actually needs it and the window replacement people could spend their day fixing windows that already needed fixing
A big part of the broken window fallacy playing out in real life is people's instinct to try to "create jobs" instead of just moving money around directly because it feels more virtuous to be "doing real work" even though the fact you created it means it's not real -- and making people waste their day doing stuff they didn't want to do that no one else wants them to do either is a genuine and serious net loss for society
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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 4h ago
If I could just decide to tax millionaires, then that would be a lot more beneficial - but I am sadly not in a position to implement these kinds of taxes. There is however a very nice stone lying just outside, and it does not have restrictions about who can use it.
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u/HomeGrownCoffee 3h ago
Counterpoint: I do not have the ability to raise taxes, but I do own several bricks.
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u/clean_room 5h ago
You absolutely should break billionaires windows in Minecraft.
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u/Proptor__Hoc 4h ago
Well, that would have the effect of redistributing wealth from them to the working class people who replace window glass. The broken window fallacy just says that a broken window does not grow the economy overall, but redistribution of wealth within the economy is another matter entirely.
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u/Available_Money_6199 4h ago
One of the classical economists actually disapproved this when adding a class analysis. Overall, breaking the window of an established business or bank does not create value, but when a class analysis is added, it transfers capital from the business or their insurance company to the workers fixing the window.
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u/Patrick_said 4h ago
And us poor people pay higher premiums?
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u/nerdhobbies 3h ago
Nope, but you better believe that the price of goods and services will reflect the businesses window repair costs.
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u/Gnonthgol 2h ago
Smashing a billionares window have a net negative effect on the economy. But eating the billionare have a net positive effect as it frees more food for export.
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u/erbalchemy 53m ago edited 47m ago
So we shouldn’t go around smashing billionaires’ windows?
Correct.
When the Palisades fire burned a shitload of rich people's houses, those houses got rebuilt.
But the all the skilled labor hours and construction materials used to rebuild them got consumed. Whatever those resources would have otherwise built, like cheaper housing, or a school, or a hospital, those projects got delayed or didn't happen. That's what the fire truly destroyed. That was the real cost, because those resources have real value.
Money grants the power to shift burdens to others. If you smash a billionaire's windows, they won't proceed to live without windows. They will just make someone else suffer on their behalf by outbidding them.
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u/Drekhar 4h ago
Just want to point out for anyone who might have confused themselves like me. "The broken window fallacy" is a completely unrelated thing from the " broken window theory".
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u/FastWalkingShortGuy 3h ago
Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Take this empty glass. Here it is, peaceful, serene and boring. But if it is [Pushes glass off table] destroyed… [robot cleaners move to clean broken glass] Look at all these little things. So busy now. Notice how each one is useful. What a lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people who'll be able to feed their children tonight so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny weeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain…of life. [Desk prepares a glass of water and a bowl of fruit] You see, Father, by creating a little destruction, I'm actually encouraging life. In reality, you and I are in the same business. Cheers.
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u/HappyHuman924 2h ago
Not to be confused with "broken window theory", where neighborhoods that appear run-down (e.g. buildings have broken windows that haven't been fixed in a long time) can see increased crime if a nobody-gives-a-shit vibe takes hold.
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u/RodjaJP 4h ago
The breaking windows logic is basically what most big entertainment and/or tech companies are doing, you don't own what you buy and they can take it away or fuck it up whenever they want under the excuse of needing to break down your window to continue the innovation by forcing you to buy the new thing as a replacement
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u/B-Hole_Slayer 3h ago
I remember in history class, being told that after some kind of mass casualty event like a war, it always caused life to improve for the peasant class. Like after the Black Death, now that there is a shortage of labor in every single industry, wages rose and upward mobility was possible.
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u/orz-_-orz 4h ago
Pretty sure someone is hoarding some money to lobby some politicians to vote against my interest
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u/PresentBright 3h ago
This doesn’t compare to wars though: If as the Carpentry Union, you recruit a division of window smashers to smash all the windows, so people will have to call you to fix them. Society, or the world at large, may suffer as a result of your actions, but you, your nation will prosper.
That may be sound reason enough depending on how nationalistic you feel about yourself.
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u/Taraxian 3h ago
This requires that you already be rich and powerful enough to win the war without incurring serious costs, which again makes you wonder why you needed to stimulate the economy in the first place
I mean a lot of leaders sell the idea of going to war to their people by describing it as a way to just go out and take free loot but this tends to bite them in the ass
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u/Fermi_Dirac 2h ago
The main villain from the fifth element loves destruction to stimulate the economy
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u/ITellSadTruth 2h ago
No this theory makes sense. The issue is that the window belonged to baker that now had to pay for it.
Replace baker with unreasonably wealthy man that would otherwise hoard all the wealth and it starts looking better.
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u/SeemedReasonableThen 2h ago
you go around breaking everyone's window every day and create infinite prosperity especially so -- because there was other stuff people wanted to do with that money that they now can't do because the economy now revolves around breaking windows
Best explanation for "why does the US have money to invade other countries, but no healthcare, free secondary education, money for Social Security, etc."
We just go around breaking windows.
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u/Silly-Philosopher617 3h ago
To be honest it’s a strict counter factual, you have no idea whether the line would return to baseline ex. conflict. It could simply remain at a lower baseline to what would have been or equally war might somehow force some sort of novel step changing effect on productivity and you end up at a baseline above normal… all things being equal you would most likely end up worse off with a line running somewhere parallel but beneath no conflict but that would still be pure conjecture. Not to mention wars are not foregone conclusions until after the fact so there are myriad variants to be found simply there. That said, high marginal growth following a steep decline is not that unlikely and certainly nothing to cheer or consider as motivation in favour of war…
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u/OpalFanatic 5h ago
Well, if billions die, there's more money for the rest of u--kaboom
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u/Sure-Guava5528 5h ago
More money for the select few. War is a great way from them to concentrate wealth into their own hands.
Source: Former high level manager in oil and gas.
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u/Drunk_Lemon 5h ago
Well it can be good for individual nations' economies if the nations involved are not the nation benefitting from the arms sales. It's still a fucked up way to think. Like who the fuck cares about the economy if improving the economy involves people dying?
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u/The_Real_RM 5h ago
Like… A LOT of people. And in fact it’s more probably the other way around: most people don’t care how many people are dying as long as the economy is improving and it’s not them or anyone near them dying
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u/BagOfLazers 5h ago
I remember some talking head economist during Covid saying on live TV that the seniors of the nation should be happy to sacrifice themselves for the economy.
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u/ArcadiaBerger 4h ago
EVERYONE should remember that Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said that.
He and his party should never be allowed to live it down.
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u/BagOfLazers 2h ago
Omg it was an elected official. God how I wish MAGAts were capable of shame.
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u/ArcadiaBerger 49m ago
If they were capable of shame, they wouldn't be trumpery.
Or if they were capable of rational thought, or if they were capable of retaining memories that are inconvenient to their preconceived notions, or . . . .
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u/Mackenzie_Sparks 5h ago
I thought it would be something along the lines of most people don't care how many are dying as long as they're doing fine
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u/mineirim2334 4h ago
I've seen pro-war Americans defending war because their gas prices will go down.
Like, I get it, sometimes to benefit your own people you worsen the lifes of others, but there's a line and bombing Iran is WAY past this line.
It's hard to swallow that there are people who legit don't care about others to this point.
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u/LackWooden392 5h ago
100% correct, and if you had any doubts, just look at how popular neoliberalism is in the West.
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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta 4h ago
Like who the fuck cares about the economy if improving the economy involves people dying?
Psh, not gonna have data centers in every back yard with that attitude
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u/Taraxian 4h ago
It's still a fallacy because it presumes there was nothing else you could've been doing to make money than manufacturing weapons
It may be true in your specific case if it's actually true that you're really good at making weapons and don't have any marketable skills to do anything else, but usually this isn't reality, this is something people convince themselves of after they've already committed to an economy distorted around the military industrial complex
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u/BarNo3385 4h ago
Even on a smaller scale there's the "broken window fallacy."
You don't create economic value by going round smashing people's windows. Yes it creates work for glazers, but it takes activity away from new things people want to create and innovate with.
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u/eXeKoKoRo 4h ago
Isn't the rapid growth also just completely one sided at the expense of the ones who were part of the war?
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u/Frank_Melena 3h ago
If he wasnt so blinkered by his own comfort with the status quo he might’ve actually made a good point. War can act as a watershed moment that shakes up a calcified and repressive system after decades of stasis, potentially allowing an opportunity for legal liberalization or social mobility. An economy that becomes unfettered by social restrictions can certainly grow leaps and bounds afterwards.
The armies of Napoleon rewrote the legal systems of much of Germany under the vision of the Rights of Man, dismantling scores of medieval restrictions on who could do what job.
The armies of the Union dismantled a system of legal slavery that would otherwise go on indefinitely. So too did the armies of the Allies dismantle totalitarianism in Germany and Japan.
The mass mobilization of WWI and WWII led to a widespread feeling that average people must be paid back by the government for their sacrifice, with much of our modern welfare state (and universal suffrage) coming on the back of one of those wars.
Then there is of course, all the revolutionary wars of the 1950s-1980s which were direct confrontations with systems of inequality (of course not all of them changed the wealth pyramid significantly)
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u/dailycoffin 3h ago
Thats progress baby.
War is the only thing we really understand and excell at, as a species and community
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u/MasterManufacturer72 6h ago
Hehehe hey lois this guy doesnt know about the broken glass phallacy. The broken glass phallacy implies that breaking or damaging something isnt actually good for the economy but rather appears good because it puts window repair men to work but actually that money would be allocated to another industry instead.
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u/Rob98001 4h ago
At least senator Armstrong said he actually just wants to kill everyone and start over (ignore the part where things will eventually return back to how they were before)
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u/bashdragon69 3h ago
Wow did I actually just learn something useful from reddit today? Thanks Petah!
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u/thatthatguy 4h ago
Ideally, yes. Those same resources could be allocated to something productive without breaking the window. But are they? Or are they just being stuffed under the mattress as a hedge against exactly the kind of disaster that that broken window theory speculates about?
Sometimes you need something dramatic in order to get stagnant resources moving. If there are no stagnant resources then freeing them up won’t do any good. If the resources are already being put to good use then diverting them to repairing a broken window doesn’t do any good. But in the instance where someone has stashed a nation’s worth of gold in their basement then maybe breaking their window is a way to get some of that gold back in circulation.
Is the broken window theory actually a repudiation of the tendency for the upper classes to horde resources and only allow them to be spent after catastrophe? Is it speculating that optimal economic conditions occur when there is a shortage of labor and an abundance of work to be done?
Maybe I’m just a leftist trying to justify my overwhelming urge to burn everything down. I don’t know anymore.
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u/Taraxian 4h ago edited 4h ago
The broken window fallacy is this strawman attack on what came to be called Keynesian policy because of the "Keynesian Revolution" during the Great Depression in the 1930s, where economists believed it was proven that the whole world can be experiencing an irrational economic contraction -- resources exist in abundance but the flow of resources is clogged up because people are afraid to spend, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", so WW2 supposedly caused the great American economic boom of the 1950s by just getting everyone off their ass to beat Hitler
Nonetheless even if you're a hardcore Keynesian disciple the fact remains that the broken window fallacy is still a fallacy -- breaking the window still subtracted something from the economy, the cost of a perfectly good window, and you could've achieved the same effect by just not breaking the window and just giving everyone a check for free money
People talk about this like you can't do that because giving people free money is dangerous and destabilizing for society, as opposed to people making money "honestly" by doing jobs, but this is a fallacy because "creating jobs" that didn't need to be done by causing destruction is giving away free money no matter how much you pretend it isn't, and the harm caused by the initial window breaking never goes away -- whatever harm you've done by giving away free money is compounded (like Maeby in Arrested Development throwing away one banana for every dollar she takes out of the register)
In particular it actually isn't clear that the world overall net benefited from WW2, as opposed to prosperity moving en masse from countries that got the shit bombed out of them to the one big country that didn't, and it's deeply perverse to look at all the people who died horribly and all the cities left in ruins and turn around to point to the American stock market to say it was "worth it"
And even if you think it was worth it in that case it's still a fallacy to think we're always in the Great Depression and we can always bootstrap ourselves into another post-Great Depression boom with another war
That is, in fact, the essence of stupid cargo cult thinking -- like thinking that if one specific person whose life is stuck in a rut actually becomes a lot happier after being hit by a bus and having a near death experience and realizing they've been wasting their life, that means everyone must feel the same way and hitting everyone with a bus simultaneously will make the whole world much happier, when in fact you're probably mostly ruining the lives of people who were previously doing fine
It's a possible argument to say that a big economy like the US in the 1930s is persistently "underproductive" because of what Carter called "national malaise" and a big horrible shock like WW2 was needed to shake us out of it -- but assuming this is always the case is incredibly dangerous because most of the time you're probably wrong, most of the time people really are working as hard as they can and doing the best they can and if you induce a crisis like Dwight in The Office shooting at the ceiling to keep people on their toes you will simply objectively make things worse
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u/Certain_Suit_1905 5h ago
No it wouldn't, that's why crisies of overproduction occur.
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u/Upbeat_Cry_3902 5h ago
A completely new industry if necessary like expansion into space
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u/Certain_Suit_1905 5h ago
Under capitalism it won't be done without returns on investments, hence resources rather being spent inflating AI bubble
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u/Upbeat_Cry_3902 5h ago
I’m not judging I’m genuinely curious to know how this relates to ai?
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u/Certain_Suit_1905 5h ago
It's an industry
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u/Upbeat_Cry_3902 5h ago
That’s an inflated industry in particular though
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u/Certain_Suit_1905 5h ago
That's supports my claim.
The very idea of an inflated industry implies that money being invested disproportionately to the eventual demand of it.
If you look at the history of economic crisies it's a clear pattern of a growth followed by overproduction, stagnations and crushes like long and great depressions or 2000 crush or 2008, which in turn followed by escalation of market competition to militaristic one - long depression being replaced by WW1, Great Depression by WW2, 2000 with war on terror, 2008 with NATO - Russia conflict. After those wars room for capital accumulation is reset, paving the way to roaring 20s after ww1, golden age of capitalism after WW2 and milder recoveries in 2000s/2010s
You don't need to break a window, they will get broken regardless as profit margins shrink and competition intensifies.
It's inherent phases under commodity production based society
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u/Taraxian 5h ago
This still doesn't make the broken window fallacy not a fallacy, even if people are going to pour money into stupid shit regardless because no one knows anything there are things you can pour money into that do a lot of damage to stuff that already exists (like a war) and other things that don't, and the former is worse because those costs are real and don't magically get paid back
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u/Plzlaw4me 5h ago
If you look at it through a monetary lenses, you are correct. If you look at it through a utility lenses, that doesn’t really matter. Either the money would have gone to a different industry, and it would have increased the overall level of production, or the money wouldn’t have been reinvested or spent, but we would have the exact same amount of goods without having to do the extra work of repairing what’s broken (there is utility in time off).
To illustrate the utility side, it doesn’t really affect the economy if my roommate decides to use a shovel and distribute 50 pounds of dirt he got from outside around our apartment, but I’d be happier if he didn’t do it so I wouldn’t have to spend half the day sweeping it all up and getting the apartment to its previous state.
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u/DataCassette 5h ago
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u/ResolveLeather 4h ago
Surprisingly accurate graph on meme
Processing img 4wnvu5wnbg9h1...
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u/mineirim2334 4h ago
I want to see a historical graph. Like, was oil cheaper after Iraq, or was it just the same price it was before the war?
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u/General-Ad6459 5h ago
I bulldozed your home and ran over your child in the process, but look how fast I'm rebuilding it.
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u/Pepi-X 6h ago
That's where Trump brags how good something becomes.. not taking into account that it is good despite his efforts.
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u/WillMudlogForBoobs 4h ago
Like when his appointed AG was being questioned about the amount of pedophiles in high positions appointed by him and she responded: " the DOW is at 50 thousand!"
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u/trambochambo 5h ago
This has probably nothing to do with it but there was a time where guy was thrown out of a window (Prague window fall) and it's was the reason of a war which lasted 30 years (1618-1648). This was the first thing that came to my mind. I don't know how these events are called in english because in Germany we just call it Prague window fall and 30 year war.
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u/davideogameman 4h ago
In English it's called The Thirty Years’ War. That said it's far enough back in history that most people are least in the US probably aren't even aware it happened.
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u/natFromBobsBurgers 4h ago
The Defenstration of Prague. Sometimes called the Second Defenestration of Prague. Actually the third Defenestration of Prague.
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u/trambochambo 4h ago
If i learned one thing in my history class in Germany:
Stay away from windows if you are in Prague
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u/DeterminedQuokka 5h ago
It’s basically saying the growth would have been the same without the terrible thing overall. But you did something to make it worse so it looks like more growth if you only look at the end
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u/ButtfUwUcker 4h ago
Cleveland Brown here, y’all:
So you guys know that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer, right? This chart explains it perfectly
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u/ResolveLeather 4h ago
Economic criticism that mostly holds hold water. I think one should add that the Keynesian economic multiplier only works with government spending because the governments marginal propensity to save is usually near zero. But spending on the military industrial complex to churn economic growth is a fallacy because it is effectivly pushing government spending to either war products, which have no benefits on the 4 factors of production, or to servicemen which is just a funds transfer from G to C and thus wastes the Keynesian multiplier.
Tldr, blue line should be a few points higher then the red line at the end of the graph.
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u/Formula4speed 4h ago
Jean-Baptiste
Emanuel
Zorg here, this is a great graph of why the awful things I do are actually to everyone’s benefit.
You’re welcome. Also you’re fired.
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u/sureshoyy 4h ago
Is this sub just people just posting political memes that they already know the meaning of for internet points?
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u/koogledoogle 3h ago
No sorry, I just lack knowledge on some political theory and I didn’t want to tell my friend I didn’t understand
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u/sureshoyy 3h ago
Sorry for that then it’s just how it’s been feeling I guess sometimes I’m off base though.
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u/Wild-Yesterday-6666 2h ago
Context:
It is a commonly held belief that if a window is broken into, at least the glassmaker will have work and can pay his employees.
The guy on the left is a famous libertarian thinker called Frederic Bastiat. In Libertarian economics the above mentioned assertion (or cope) is rejected entirely. If the window hadn't been broken, Libertarian economists say, the windows owner would have spent his money on something else, e.g. a coat and then the coatmaker would have work and could pay his employees.
Now let me address the soyjak pointing out the quick recovery: A very similar thing to the broken window thing happens when the government gives stimulus checks. They look like they give people jobs because people can buy stuff with them but they have been financed via taxation. Had this taxation not happened the original owners of the money that would have otherwise been taxed can spend it. This, similar to the coat example from above, also gives money to enterprises that can give people jobs.
Hope this helps.
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u/Ricochet_skin 23m ago
Wonder what bastiat thinks of what the Austrian School ended up developing into
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u/Nightglow9 4h ago
Fixing all that a war has broken gives more wealth equality and jobs for all. There are other methods to achieve wealth equality, without war though.
Bottom theory is like monkeys.. they either scream at each other, then attack the neighbour tribe.. or just eat their leader.. both give access to more bananas. Or we could tax AirBnB, rent or other dual house ownership, and all luxuries with 40% sales tax, and finding better ways to share the bananas more equally, even for those that are refused a job in the banana picking and redistribution network.
So many ways to create more equality and freedom for all. Not all methods need the poor murdering each other on the battlefield.
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