Broken window fallacy
Also called: The seen and the unseen
Counting what is spent and gained, and ignoring what that money would otherwise have done.
How to spot it
Whenever someone says an event or a subsidy “creates jobs”, ask what the same money would have done if it hadn't been used that way.
Example
“The storm was terrible, but it created work for every roofer in town.” (The townspeople now have less to spend on everything else.)
How to answer it
Count both sides: what was gained, and what was lost or never happened. Frédéric Bastiat set this out in his 1850 essay “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen”.
Related
- Single cause: Blaming one factor for something that has several causes.
- Cherry-picking: Showing only the evidence that supports your case, and leaving out the rest.
- Zero-sum thinking: Assuming that one person's gain must be another's loss, as if the total were fixed.