It occurs to me that there is some similarity between the Broken Window fallacy and a failure to see objectively the world’s geopolitical picture.
A boy throws a rock and crashes a store window. Immediately, there is a flurry of economic activity — the store owner calls the glassier, who replaces the window. He gets paid. So does his assistant, the glass manufacturer, and so on. Each of them are now able to pay their bills - and things seem to be booming. The money velocity accelerates.
Actually, the belief that wars are good for the economy is a variation of the same idea, just on a greater scale.
So, on the face of it - on the surface - it seems like breaking a window stimulates the economy. However, on closer examination, there are downsides - the store owner spends his money on a new window, and can’t buy the next door property - and expand his business - and create jobs and hire more people… which, on balance, would have contributed to the economy more than just replacing a window.
In a way, it’s similar with geopolitics. It is important to have a balanced, stable network of relations between nations. That’s what the treaty of Westphalia was all about — it created a world order in which nations could get along without fighting all the time.
There were endless numbers of opportunities to address the Russia - NATO issues over the past 3 decades. Instead, each time our Zbigniew followers policy architects dismissed them as if they were crazy. Had they agreed to look a little deeper, beneath the surface - the current tragedy (and the current great danger to world peace) could have been avoided.
This is why people like Kissinger, who know how to create balanced international systems are worth their weight in diamonds, not even in gold. And negative, destructive emotionalist “thinkers” like Brzezinski need to be recognized as dangerous. |
