So a very aggressive estimate of the destruction from this hack would give us an extra 200,000 divorces over each of the next four years, and so the divorce rate is 20 percent higher for each of the next four years. That’s definitely noticeable, but not unheard-of.

So what’s the macroeconomic impact? Here’s where I’m truly making numbers up.

Divorce is actually pretty simple in lots of cases — you just fill in the forms. (There’s an argument that paralegals should be able to do this work.) Let’s say that each divorce leads to $5,000 in extra spending on lawyers. That would mean an extra $1 billion in extra spending on lawyers per year, for each of the next four years. Value-added in the legal service industry was $225 billion in 2013, so the impact on the legal services industry as a whole turns out to be pretty small — a spike of about 0.4 percent higher demand for the next four years. Of course the impact on family lawyers will be much more concentrated, but still, this isn’t huge.

For the economy as a whole, you have to decide whether the extra spending on divorce lawyers is extra spending, or whether it comes partly from cutting back on other things. Even if it all comes with no offsetting spending in other categories, then $1 billion in legal fees pales in comparison to a $17 trillion economy. G.D.P. would be higher by 0.006 percent for a few years – too small an effect to measure.

I suspect the bigger economic issue is what these divorces would do for new household formation. If all these newly single people formed new households, then household formation will be 200,000 higher each year for the next four years, and that would fuel demand for construction. But that seems too big: In the United States, folks who have been divorced start by moving in with friends or family, and then very often move in quickly with new partners. A lot of this is musical chairs not leading to demand for an extra home.

A reasonable guess might be that annual household formation would be 100,000 higher for the next four years (the other half quickly repartner), but 50,000 lower for the subsequent four years (as some of the extra divorced folks continue to repartner). I’m not quite sure how to convert this into G.D.P.-equivalents, but it seems relatively small compared to household formation rates.

Let’s assume each new household involves construction of a $200,000 home or apartment, which is roughly the median home price. (Estimates vary.) That’s $20 billion in extra home construction each year for four years. That’s big enough to matter, enough to raise G.D.P. by 0.12 percent in the first year. But while G.D.P. would remain higher for the next three years, G.D.P. growth would not be. And some of this effect would be temporary.