And It Seems Like Total Destruction's the Only Solution

Yes, the newspapers were right: the breaking of windows was general all over Ireland. They were breaking on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, breaking softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly breaking into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. They were breaking, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. Shards of glass lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the windows breaking faintly through the universe and faintly breaking, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

 All right, enough of that now! No more literary parodies today! (See the last paragraph of the link just offered.) On to business:

Summing up my views on disasters:

1) When we look at history, we see disasters have sometimes been a) the downfall of a person, local group, or whole culture (Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the explosion of Vesuvius, the fall of Minoan civilization) and sometimes b) spurred a person, local group or whole culture on to greater achievements (Churchill after Gallipoli, Noto after the earthquake of 1693, or Rome after the sack by the Celts.) If there is any good argument as to why this mixed outcome should not be seen in economic affairs, I have never heard it.

2) Sometimes, even in the positive cases, a) all that we see is a remarkable degree of recovery from the bad fortune, e.g., "After losing the Peloponnesian War, Athens remarkably managed to regain much of its empire in the following decades, although it never again reached its former power." In exceptional others b) we judge the person was in the end actually the better for the "misfortune": "If Johhny Weismuller had not been sickly as a child, he never would have become an Olympic champion swimmer." Again, why this would not apply to economics is beyond me: Sometimes, people will respond to a disaster in a way that increases real GDP growth, at least for a time. There is no reason why, in exceptional cases, that increase could not continue long enough that they actually become wealthier than they would have without the disaster. Of course, they would have been even wealthier absent the disaster, given the same "rallying together" and hard work. But absent the disaster, those were not on the horizon as possibilities.

3) None of the above argues for deliberately inflicting disasters on ourselves or others. On a purely utilitarian basis, once we inflict a disaster on some target, we firstly don't know if we will get 1a or 1b. Even if we get 1b, we still don't know if we will get 2a or 2b. Only in the very rare case of 2b would total utility be raised by a deliberately produced disaster.

4) Most economists who write a "There is a silver lining" op-ed are really doing no more than is a preacher who tries to raise the spirits of his flock after a disaster: if we all pull together, we can come out of this even stronger! Really, must those croaking "broken window fallacy" appear, like an army of grim spring peepers after the first thaw, every time an economist tries to be not entirely dismal?