But now there is no one making sure the useless junk stays popular, so less jobs.
Except that's exactly the broken window fallacy: We could instead spend that money on other things.
Which is of course what's always happened. Remember Pokemon? There's a craze that's not a craze at all - it's been going on since the 90s. It doesn't seem to be getting killed by fidget spinners. In the meantime hundreds of smaller fads have come and gone. We've have the words "fad" and "craze" to describe this sort of thing since way before the rise of rapid-response Chinese manufacturing.
Furbies, tamogatchis, pogs.
There was that season where suburban moms were practically dueling to the death over Tickle Me Elmos.
There's an economic study I remember seeing in the last couple of decades that studied the value of middlemen. The study started with the assumption that middlemen were parasitic entities, especially since so much economic value seems to come from "cutting out the middle man". But the study authors were most surprised about was that the countries they studied that had the most middlemen, also had the greatest number of economic health indicators. That is they found middlemen to be highly correlated with the economic output of an economy. Their conclusion was that it was probably more than correlated, but largely causative and that middle men probably provided a lot more value than they're generally given credit for.
This article seems to be providing some anecdotal data that supports the value of middle men. At the very least they are good at synthesizing back pressure data for factories so they don't end up overproducing, and have to fill landfills with stuff no one wants.
For the "middle man" study, I don't know how they came to that conclusion. But the more obvious assumption seems to be that economic output can support more middlemen, so I'm curious what data they used to argue that it works the other way around.
The true value of a middle man is connecting buyers and sellers who would otherwise have no idea the other existed, or otherwise facilitating the transaction.
Here's an example that I'm currently involved with. I was approached by someone to create a device that's needed on the market, but doesn't exist. I'm quite capable of building the thing and familiar with the domain, but never knew the thing was needed. Similarly, the company approaching me doesn't have the internal skills to build the device, but they can sell it. The market for this particular device isn't very large (it's only businesses who have machinery that was built using a particular older technology and need to have repairs done), and there are alternatives, so that explains why no one is building these.
In this case, the company that approached me -- the middle man -- has excellent knowledge of the market and its needs and how to best serve them. I, the producer, had no idea this product was needed, and even knowing that now, have no access to this segment of the market, and it's simply not large enough to make it worth my time to begin a marketing effort in that direction. Similarly, the end customers have never heard of me, and have no concept that such a device could even be built.
So there you are, a middleman has just added value by offering to buy something that I otherwise would not know to build, and by selling it (along with other products and services), to a very underserved market that otherwise would be forced to purchase newer equipment they otherwise don't need.
That was my conclusion as well - when times are good you don't mind someone who contributes little hanging around. When times are tough, they're out and what little value they offered is replicated by someone desperate to stick around. When a business has a lot of administrative staff times are good and those watching the market can conclude, due to the number of administrative hires, that times are good for a particular market sector. But concluding that it means middlemen are undervalued seems like whoever authored the study had some odd motive.
Fidget junk is just an allegory for a much more pervasive trend.
I feel like the travel agency bit in there actually worked against their thesis.
Well, at least we can look forward to a new messaging app for teams. :D :(
In the end, the fallacy is that "it allows us to run an economy" doesn't actually justify anything.
If you have 10 chaps hanging around, all of whom have broken windows, there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows.
To the degree that the novelty is good, keeping otherwise unemployed people active producing novelties is neither a loss nor a waste of time. Of course it doesn't make sense to go around breaking windows to keep the dynamic up, unless breaking windows is enormous fun and gives people lots of utility (which it might!).
More generally, thinking about these things in terms of money rather than wealth, production and consumption (a stock and its positive and negative flows) leads people to faulty intuitions. They're familiar with household budgeting and other situations where money seems tangible. But money is just a way of accounting for the stock, and measuring and transporting the flows. It's the actual wealth, production and consumption that counts.
This is the core of the fallacy. There'd be more net wealth without breaking the window in the first place, leaving the guy free to spend that money on someone else's goods/services, who would cause the exact same amount of growth but you'd still have a window.
Spending that money that would have been spent replacing broken windows elsewhere may even generate jobs for the guys who are slack.
You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth. If you're saying the window is already broken, that's not the broken window fallacy.
And if breaking windows is a thing we value in society, then it wouldn't be a bad thing to go around breaking windows and continuously employ people to fix them up again.
The reason I'm stretching it like this is to make "broken windows fallacy" fit fidget spinners and other fads, because that's what's needed to make the analogy work. (You know, the actual topic.)
You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth
I never said you could. People can, however, increase their wellbeing by consuming wealth, and a cycle of consuming wealth and producing wealth is not a waste of time; if breaking windows was beneficial to wellbeing, then it wouldn't be a waste of time to continuously cycle between breaking and repairing windows.
Don't forget that wealth isn't a terminal value anyone is interested in; wellbeing (aka utility) is.