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'We'll get infrastructure out of it' is the broken window fallacy

So this economic argument goes something like this. Don't worry about the trillions of dollars of economic waste, of setting trillions of dollars on fire, because at the end of it, we'll get a few billion of usable infrastructure. I mean, that is the broken window fallacy

Episode 237: FF-P-MEG (episode page, opens in a new tab) October 10, 2025, 2:28 p.m. CT 00:29:52 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)

Voice-matched

Summary

Dave rejects the argument that trillions burned on AI are fine because usable infrastructure will be left over, like dark fiber after the dot-com bust. He calls it the broken window fallacy taken to the largest extreme possible, noting annual AI infrastructure spending equals Singapore's GDP while revenue lags far behind.

Not in the audio. Guest episode (Daniel J. Lewis; 0.35 threshold). The span includes one Unknown cue ('fire, because at the end of it, we'll') that clearly continues Dave's sentence between his 3-cue and 2-cue runs.