Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing.

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His basic principle was the broken-window theory: If you don't fix one window in the building, another will be broken and then another, and eventually the whole block will be lost.

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To explain this in easy-to-understand terms, Bastiat referenced a broken window.

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He was captured on police cameras wearing an Afro-style wig and throwing burning cardboard through a broken window at Manningham Ward Labour Club.

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As it happened, the smell vanished as soon as the place warmed up, and it was her husband who performed all the tasks: lighting the stubborn Rayburn stove and forcing open the kitchen window, activating the bathroom plumbing and disposing of the broken-backed mice in the traps.

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Large hurricanes, like Sandy, can create clean-up jobs and stimulate GDP growth, although, as Bastiat pointed out in his Broken Window Fallacy, much of the spending will be diverted spending rather than net new spending.

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There's also a bit of the broken window fallacy at play here: Not seen is the science and investment not created by the mis-direction of resources to this or that temporarily favored project or field.

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Geoffrey de cided to place an old, slightly exotic-looking, artistically shaped radiator, which he had removed for a client because it was broken, in the window of his workshop, just to make it look like a shop.

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