I’m happy to see that Wikipedia triumphs once again on the topic of the “Broken Window Theory.” It is not to be confused with the “Broken Window Fallacy” of Frederic Bastiat (Jonah even gets a favorable mention in the Wikipedia entry).

The idea of the BWF is that you can stimulate your neighborhood’s economy by breaking everyone’s windows , thus creating countless business opportunities for local repair-men. One corollary of this fallacy is that if you burden your economy by imposing caps on carbon emissions, you’ll create a whole bunch of “green jobs” to fix the problem you’ve just created, and that will somehow make the economy better than it is now.