Part of: The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat, in 6 Vols. The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Vol. 3: Economic Sophisms and “What is Seen and What is Not Seen”

This is a modern critique of Bastiat. Carabini argues that the truth of “The Broken Window” holds, Bastiat undermines it by failing to offer an answer to the question Bastiat leads with: “ What would become of the glaziers if no one ever broke a window?”

While Rodrik doesn’t directly address Bastiat in this book, he does address many of the arguments made in Economic Sophisms. Rodrik argues that more attention needs to be on political situations and that economic policy should serve politics, rather than the other way around.

Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt reintroduces and modernizes many of Bastiat’s concepts from “What is Seen” and Economic Sophisms in this book. He devotes an entire chapter to the “Broken Window Fallacy,” which forms the core of “What is Seen.”

The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular…

If there’s a difficulty that comes in reading Bastiat, it has to do with the happy truth that nearly everything he writes is worth underlining. Bastiat is common sense personified, and there are lessons in seemingly every subject the great Frenchman chose to comment on. If one only skimmed, one…