I take your point on the window. And in all of the confusion, no one ever commiserates for the shards.

Cheers,

Mitch

All things being equal, everyone is worse off because of the broken window because whereas there was once a nice window AND money to spend on something else, say, one’s own child’s medicine, now that the window is broken, one must choose to spend money fixing the window or buy medicine for one’s daughter, to follow the extreme. Of course if you are a producer you probably just go out and work harder to pay for both. But then that is activity that could have produced something else, perhaps a nice Sunday dinner for a sick relative.

Of course, each situation is different, but the point is that all things being equal, everyone looses a little bit with destruction.

I do have to agree with you though that it is great to view economics from a LOA perspective. Traditional economics assumes that Things have a certain intrinsic worth that cannot change. But truly nothing has intrinsic value in and of itself except for human beings. And people are beings with unlimited Godlike potential to create, so therefore the value that is able to be created by them is endless as well. Abundance mentality rather than scarcity mindset. There is “enough and to spare” for everyone in this world and universe. And if we did ever run out and there was a true need, I do believe more would be created/attracted. That is assuming we are following the laws of the universe and being good stewards over what we have already.

Notes…hahaha!

Me neither. Conversations are supposed to ebb and flow.

Heck, this post has more comments than any previous articles, so I’m happy to take the plunge into whatever tributaries the main topics branch off into.

Since I don’t really understand economics, I can’t tackle that broken window analogy on the merits.
However, I can suggest further food for thought:

Hazlitt seems to have obscured the fallacy by using a polarized view. He seems to understand that readers will resonate with his reasoning if he made it about them. By equating the broken window from the perspective of reallocating funds, something to which we all can relate, he puts forth a compelling argument for destruction equals bad economy.

However, he neglects to follow the money. (If he did, could you add that bit to your response?)
The window guy gets x dollars for replacing the window. He and his wife breathe a sigh of relief, as he is now able to pay for the baby’s medicine.

Okay, that’s extreme but, if you don’t consider the concept of economics in terms of the greater good, then you only get half the picture.

Perhaps we should try to consider economics in terms of the law of attraction (LOA).
There is no scarcity in LOA. Tapping into abundance is a simple matter of attracting it.

In the limiting views of most economic theories, money is the oil which lubricates the machine of supply and demand.
With LOA, money becomes merely a cog which turns a bigger wheel of fortune.
Think about it. If you can have everything that you want, merely by thinking it into existence, what do you need money for? The answer is simple. Hear a good song lately? What key was it in? What was the tempo?
You probably don’t know, but your ears perceived pleasing tones that translated notes and measures, clef lines and bass lines into a recognizable tune.

Money is the collection of notes (pun intended? hmmm) that most people understand.

Cheers,

Mitch

In summary, many people mistakenly believe that destruction is good for the economy. “War is our business, and business is good…” If someone breaks your window, you are probably going to buy a new one. Hence, the window guy gets more business. So actually it worked out for good, right?

Well in the large scheme of things destruction makes everyone a little less rich, even if one or two people gain. Sure, maybe it helped the window guy whom you paid to replace your broken window, but that was money you were going to use to buy a new ____. So instead of having a perfectly good window AND a new _____, you only have a new window. The money you would have given to the guy who makes the _____ had to go to the window guy instead.

Therefore destruction does NOT help the economy overall.

***By the way, I think the One Lesson learned from this book is that it is important to look at both the seen AND the unseen. Everyone sees the broken window and the new window, but what they don’t see is the new _____ that never came to pass.

Sorry to go on a tangent…feel free to tangentalize again!

First and foremost, the Drupal software platform upon which it rested was designed with community interaction in mind. Since it was my first experience with blogging, it set the standard very high.

Next, there was the sheer marketing genius of John Jonas. While I’m sure he wasn’t the first person to incorporate revenue-sharing for Google AdSense, his timing was impeccable. Judging by the comments of hundreds of members (and the numerous tech support questions I fielded), this was a relatively recent development in the online money-making niche.

Third, the social networking aspect of the site was phenomenal. Because John worked diligently to keep out undesirables, we generally had a well-behaved group. Opinionated? Sometimes. Mis-informed? Maybe. But well-behaved.

Finally, there was the AdSense incentive which, for many of us, became irrelevant, as we discovered the true meaning of blogging.

Ironically, WritingUp and other successful community blogging sites are perfect examples of why you seldom find all four dynamics on a stand-alone blog: the power was distributed over three golden strands.

SEO
Content
Contributors

The third strand was the most powerful. WritingUp regularly had dozens of members logged in simultaneously. That kind of engagement fed the content, which fed the SEO. The self-contained ecosystem sucked in visitors and churned out members.

Contrast that with our lonely digital outposts. We literally hang on by a single thread: content.

While blogging software does a fair job of SEO, it doesn’t come close to the kind of promotion John did with WritingUp.

Of course, we are our only contributor! Comments, when we get them, are like sips of water out here in the sun-baked wasteland of words. We learned that comments beget comments and generally lead to links.

That works here, but on a much smaller scale.

After all is said and done, I have opted for a less cohesive version of the community. Perhaps you can try this on for size: a feed reader.

I use bloglines.com and subscribe to a variety of cool blogs. This is just like WritingUp in that you can see multiple topics at once.

The community aspect is disjointed. You have to take that extra step to click over to the blog, if you want to comment.

But, short of joining another community site, that’s about the best I can imagine myself doing.

There is a whole ‘nother topic: once you learn the devastation of losing a community, how the heck do you pick up the pieces and try again?

For me, there will never be anything like WritingUp.
So my bottom line echoes your bottom line: it is impossible to do all the stuff you need to do as a writer. Marketing alone is a full-time endeavor. So, without a budget to outsource the things you don’t have time to do, you’re basically doodling in the sand.

Heads Up! Yonder blows the sirocco.

Mitch

The key word in your last comment, Jessica, is seemingly. In truth, the underlying framework for my mental processes is the idea that EVERYTHING is related to EVERYTHING.

One of the most compelling visuals I’ve ever seen was in the first Men In Black movie.
As the movie ended, the camera zoomed out from the ground level, slowly but predictably reaching Earth orbit. As the planet shrinks into the distance, the perspective suddenly changes and Earth becomes a marble in the hand of an alien.

The alien carelessly flicks the Gaian orb onto the sand of an alien landscape.
If you remember the movie, assuming you saw it, there was entire galaxy on a cat’s collar (“Orion’s belt” ha-ha).

While this cliché appears all over Hollywood, the idea of our being just a minor part of some larger system intrigues me.

During high school biology, I used to imagine that we were under a microscope. “Somebody” was watching us dissect frogs!

Anyway, to use another movie, Revenge of the Nerds,
Betty asked Lewis how come he was so good …(wink wink).
To paraphrase Lewis, I think about systems all the time. I dream about them – confusing vignettes that don’t help me solve anything, yet. I read what experts are saying about their perspective regarding systems.

One of the weirder things I do is to try making up a game that involves the system. These games don’t usually progress beyond lots of paper scribbling, but it’s a lot of fun.

Hmmm, maybe I’ll write a post about that.

Cheers,

Mitch

I get my kicks hanging out with my baby girl and making sweet designs on the computer! I’m lucky if anything else gets done at home! LOL!

Even so, I think it’s really really important to analyze where thoughts come from, and by that I mean the underlying assumptions that a person has about the world. Are they based on circumstance or principles? And then see whether or not those ideas are producing good “fruit” in your life.

I think it is cool how you connect seemingly totally unrelated ideas with such ease. That must be one of your talents!

Hmmm, interesting take on polls. My wife, Toni, always says something similar about those food industry studies: the first thing we have to watch out for is, “who sponsored this study?”

As for your questions, I am the sum of my cogitations

Sometimes, I wonder where these ideas come from.
I think that I have always had access to the creative spark, which allows me to not only write stories in one massive brain dump, but also to create board games and develop computer software.

As for this post, I think the idea came from turning that spark inward and finding connections to seemingly unrelated bits of mental backwash.

What we commonly refer to as divine inspiration or serendipity, I think of as the law of attraction.

Simply stated, I get joy from sharing parables, creating analogies and presenting old ideas in new garments. The more I do these activities, the more they seem to manifest.

You should have seen the old WritingUp blog site! I had dozens of these ideas sprinkled through comments as well as my own posts.

I just realized I answered both questions!

Cheers,

Mitch