Are disasters really good for the economy?

A falácia da janela quebrada explicada:

How can it be true that such major disasters often end up boosting growth?

Part of the answer has to do with the way we measure economic activity. Gross domestic product may rise next year as a result of goods and services purchased to rebuild the affected region, but that does not take into account the $100 billion or more in housing and other infrastructure destroyed by the storm and its aftermath.

“We measure gross economic activity instead of net economic activity, so everything tends to look like incremental activity over time,” said David Joy, vice president of RiverSource Investments, the asset management arm of Ameriprise Financial.

The broken window fallacy

The basic flaw in the logic behind such accounting was attacked a century and a half ago by French thinker Frederic Bastiat who referred to the “fallacy of the broken window.”
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“What disasters do is they divert spending,” said McTeer, now chancellor of the Texas A&M University system. “The government is doing good for the affected region, but it’s pulling resources away from all other regions.”

(na MSNBC, via Causa Liberal)

Bastiat escreveu o ensaio "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" em 1850. Infelizmente, muitos ainda não o leram...