Which French economist is known for the 'broken window fallacy'?

Which French economist is known for the “broken window fallacy”? The answer is Frédéric Bastiat.

Bastiat presented the broken-window parable in his 1850 essay “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.” In the story, a vandal breaks a shopkeeper’s window. Observers may praise the resulting payment to a glazier as economic activity, but they overlook the shopkeeper’s lost opportunity to spend that money on something else. The visible repair has a hidden cost.

The argument illustrates opportunity cost and warns against judging an economic action only by its immediate, observable effects. It does not claim that glaziers never benefit from repairs; it claims that destruction does not create a net increase in society’s wealth when the broken property is counted.

Bastiat was born in Bayonne in 1801 and became a prominent member of France’s liberal school. He also served in the French National Assembly after the 1848 Revolution. The fallacy is sometimes called the glazier’s fallacy and is often misapplied to mean that all spending is wasteful. Bastiat’s point was narrower: benefits to one group must be weighed against unseen losses elsewhere.