First off, Welcome to the forum! Always great to have new peeps around, especially with great questions (and who are debating and discussing out in the real world.) Be sure to check out the New Member welcome thread, and feel free to PM me or anyone else with any private questions or anything about the forum itself.
On to your topic:
perhaps some other examples…see here. And here.
So what? He just admitted it wasn’t an economic stimulus. Just because someone profits from rebuilding, it doesn’t mean the economy is better off than if the destruction never occured.
This leads me to believe he doesn’t fully understand the story. I haven’t read that article you sent him, but the links above (especially the videos) will do a much better job.
The bottom line is, he sees people making money and thinks “hey look…they now have a job. There is some good done. Now someone has a job…See, you and your broken window fallacy are trying to ignore that glazier, and the janitor who cleans up the glass…and all the multipliers like the guy who paints the glazier’s truck, and the guy who makes the glass, and the guy who fixed the glazier’s truck. You need to look at both sides.”
The problem is he’s ignoring the fact that destruction has occurred. The videos will illustrate this, but the point is if the man who owned the window didn’t have it broken, he would have been able to spend his money on something else…a new suit maybe…which would have created an opportunity for a tailor to profit..and added to all his “multipliers”. But now, those resources have to go to replacing the window. Meaning the man has no suit. If the vandalism had never taken place, he would have a window and a new suit. Now, he only has a window. The economy is poorer overall.
And just think…what argument is the guy trying to make anyway? If breaking windows is so good for the economy, why don’t we pay people to break more windows? Why the hell don’t we just bomb a few cities? We have pretty high unemployment…that would create plenty of jobs. Why don’t we do that?
That has to be the most ignorant statement I’ve heard in a long time. Would he say the same thing about physics or chemistry? Not that those hard sciences are the same as a social science like economics, but the point is “theories and laws” aren’t explanations, they are descriptions…there’s a difference.
But his statement here is basically an argument from ignorance…the position of “I don’t know the answer, so there must not be one.”
People do this all the time. It helps them make sense of the world and feel better about their own ignorance. It helps them explain how all these smart people in government, trying to micromanage the economy, could be so incompetent. Because the alternative (that they’re just not really that smart, and actually quite dishonest) is too hard to swallow. (See here).
People just bank on this whole idea that the world and economics is so complex that no one could ever possibly really know anything. That everything is “always something of an experiment”…that the economy is nothing more than a chemistry set for the government bureaucrats to mix chemicals into and see what comes out…never being able to know what will happen before they do something, and never knowing what would have happened had they not done it.
Everything has to be a big question mark because the person talking doesn’t have the slightest clue, so the only way he can call anyone else wrong is to say that no one can be right.
It’s a common form of rationalization…A philosophical con game people play to make reality fit their own feelings. “I don’t have the evidence or knowledge or insight to draw a conclusion, so I’m going to claim no one does.” (see here for an explanation of this)
The best you’re usually going to get from these people is a simple mention of the fact that there exist people who say opposite things. “There’s smart people on both sides of that debate.” They will pretend as if this is sufficient (because of course if there is disagreement it means it’s a matter of opinion. It’s not as if one side could be right and the other wrong. It’s just impossible to be able to know anything. And let’s not forget, these are very smart people who say these things. They have degrees and prizes and high-level posts that prove how smart they are. They’re “economic experts.” Nothing like those biased rubes who simply advise world governments on economic matters and don’t stand to gain from an inflated currency.)
Just like in most debates they really won’t be able to go beyond “Well, ____ say this government policy is a good idea. And they’re scientists.”
See what I mean?
We’re not talking about predicting human behavior. We’re talking about physical existence of desired stuff in the world. He’s saying destroying stuff creates an opportunity for some people to profit. And he even admits that this opportunity only arises because some other people lost…and yet somehow he seems to want to argue that this is a good arrangement?
But just for good measure, to speak to his point about prediction (even though it’s completely irrelevant to this discussion, he just introduced it because it helps support his defense of his ignorance), the truth is, yes, the world is complex. It can be impossibly difficult to predict the precise location a man will land if he jumps off the top of a skyscraper. There are countless variables that would make it quite difficult to do such a thing. But you don’t need a mathematical model to prove he’s going anywhere but down.
Just because you cannot tell the exact details of every specific thing does not mean overall laws cease to exist or that they should be ignored. But that’s their entire argument. People quite literally say that just because no one could tell you with “a high level of certainty” where the man will land after he jumps off the building, it means that no one can even be confident in saying what will happen to him after he jumps.
Har har har…yes, I’ve never heard that one before. And if all ignorant rubes who tried to claim someone else was wrong because “no one can be right” would quit with their nonsense, the world would be a much nicer place.