Therefore, spread fire, famine, war, pestilence, vice, and ignorance, and you will see all occupations flourish, for all will have a vast field of activity.

Frédéric Bastiat
Economic Sophisms Third Series

There still exist nowadays economists in favour of the broken window policy consisting in the belief that destruction is good for the economic health of a country. Indeed, insofar as the best measurement of wealth that has been found is GDP (Gross Domestic Product that measures wealth produced within a year), some short-sighted economists who discover that reconstruction requires increasing efforts that can be found indeed in the figures related to production, conclude that this increasing activity is a good thing, ignoring the losses from destruction completely because these are not measured by the GDP.