Huricane Irene largely spared the East coast’s larger cities from the worst of its wrath. It still cut off power to about 4 million people. And it cost 25 lives. But there is a sunny side to the billions of dollars of destruction! Politico’s Josh Boak quotes the University of Maryland’s Peter Morici:
Morici said there could be some economic growth at the end of this year and the beginning of next year, because with the rebuilding, “largely what we’re going to get is a private-sector stimulus package.”
Morici fell for the broken window fallacy; if a kid (or a hurricane) breaks a window, it creates a job for the repairman. He then spends his wages on other things, and the economy gets a boost. Why not break every window in the entire country, then? Think how much wealthier everyone would be if only a hurricane would come along and level the entire nation!
Morici could well be right that Irene could cause a small GDP boost. But that doesn’t mean that America is richer for having endured a natural disaster; hurricanes are not stimulus packages. St. Lawrence University economist Steve Horwitz draws a useful dichotomy that can help us understand what’s going on here:
GDP measures a flow of activity, not a stock of wealth. Destroying things and then rebuilding them might increase economic activity in the area affected (by drawing resources from elsewhere), but leaves us with less wealth than we would have had without the disaster. That is the real meaning of the Broken Window Fallacy.
Irene destroyed billions of dollars of America’s stock of wealth. Getting back to where we were before the hurricane will probably give a boost to GDP. But we aren’t wealthier for it, even if GDP does look better. If nothing had been destroyed, all the time, energy, and materials put into playing catch-up would have been put into making something new.
Inertia Wins! 