Bastiat’s broken window fallacy states: breaking a window may seem to generate economic activity through its repair, but it’s actually a loss once you take the opportunity cost into account.
But what if things looked different at scale? Does destruction lead to positive effects?
What if we all “both underestimate the costs of being stuck in bad equilibria, and overestimate the pain caused by burning down the system.“
This article explores this idea, by reviewing several fascinating economic papers.
