I think the interesting thing about this is to think how weird our economy functions, because at the end of this, all we will have is a net gain for the economy and an empty hole.
I guess my real point is something like "why aren't you asking this question about theater or television or live music"
I don't think "Parable of the broken window" captures the essence of our economy, it only mentions the handyman receiving 6 francs, and not him paying his suppliers, them paying their suppliers and so on, his tools, his rent, his taxes, etc.
The company mining sand is wasting sand and people's time mining the sand for the broken window.
The company that melts the sand into glass is wasting time and energy making the glass for that window.
The company that transports the window to the distributor is wasting storage space, energy(gas), and salary transporting it to the retail location(Home Depot).
The retail company is wasting storage space on the window, and perhaps a couple minutes of a salesperson's time.
The handyman is wasting his time when he installs a window to no benefit.
The insurance company is wasting their time handling the claim, and is implicitly costing everyone else in their client pool time with increased premiums.
And the person whose window was broken has their time wasted working in order to pay for the new window.
Any property that any of these people use is wasted, because if your office processes claims for broken windows the portion of the rent used for office space is wasted. (For example, if you spend enough time on broken windows, you might need extra staff and therefore a larger property.)
In each of these, maybe only a few minutes, seconds, or milliseconds(in the case of the sand needed) is wasted. But the entire ripple effect is ultimately a waste. In some cases, there appears to be no effect because a company may have additional capacity already available. But if you make a complete accounting of all effects, it is all a waste.
When I look at issues in economics, I like to erase the money entirely, since money is often nothing more than an accounting tool to make a graph reduction problem easier. In the case of a broken window, all you've done when you eliminate the money is waste resources, land usage, and many people's time.
Contrast this with a new window for a brand new building: Presumably that building is being used for some productive purpose, so the entire supply chain is implicitly being used for a productive purpose.
Leaving aside money, efficiency should never be a problem because there is always plenty of work that urgently needs doing. Freeing up people to work on more important things should always be a win.
That's not the world we live in. To explain why, you need money: nobody will pay for it!
Convincing people to spend money on things that urgently need doing is the heart of the problem. The broken window doesn't have that problem. It's a waste, but it's a very convincing reason to spend money, and the shopkeeper has money, so that's what happens.
Building a new building could be a waste, too. Overinvestment happens and new buildings do stand idle sometimes for lack of tenants.
Only if you believe people exist to serve the economy, rather than the other way around.
That isn't actually a multiplier. When the handyman is paying other people it means he isn't actually making $6. He receives $6 but then the tax man takes $2, the window costs $1, various other things cost another $2 and the handyman only keeps $1. No matter how you slice it the grand total has to be $6.
But you don't want a multiplier here anyway, because it's $6 of waste. If the $6 somehow turned into $100 then it would be that much worse.
b) Funnily enough, the example of paying people to dig random holes is frequently given in economics arguments to illustrate why the Subjective theory of value makes more sense than the Labor theory of value.
C) Holes are made to be filled. Next year's gag is probably filling the hole back up with something.
C) Like e waste for Christmases past?
The sleeper must awaken.
Arguably here they're pumping $X per day into a project that is also depreciating at $X per day (i.e. no net value is produced, ignoring the entertainment value of the stunt). So the project contributes to GDP but not to net wealth.
The failure to account for depreciation is one of the major problems with GDP as a measure of prosperity.
The only reason people think CAH is worth it, is because they think other people think it is funny and not stupid. If nobody cared about it, you wouldn't either.
Middle-class Americans spend more money landscaping their backyard than the cost of this entire project.
As part of the total cost of home ownership over a lifetime, a lot of people probably do spend tens of thousands of dollars on their lawns. Especially if they have an HOA telling them what their front and back yards should look like at all times. Much less fun than just digging a big hole!