by the Sandwichman
"There’s an arcade game called Whack-a-Mole in which a plastic mole pops up and you pound its head with a mallet. The lump-of-labor fallacy is the Whack-a-Mole of arguments about jobs. As often as you slam it, it reappears somewhere else." -- Timothy Taylor
It has taken three years but the Sandwichman's rebuttal to Timothy Taylor -- originally posted to MaxSpeak in the fall of 2004 -- is now published in the September issue of the Review of Social Economy: "Why Economists Dislike a Lump of Labor".
6 comments:
Persistence is rewarded.
Con Gratulations.
--ml
I am glad that you got it published. There are only a few economic journals that would even tough this subject.
C'mon Walker. Do I really have to pay $25 to read a 12 page paper? I recall the several postings on MaxSpeak. I had a difficult time fully understanding the argument, one side or the other. I believe that you've been arguing that the lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy itself. Is that correct? If not, I'm really in the dark. The only argument I can imagine for there being no fixed (a lump of) amount of labor, is that capital is global and the whole earth is now a source of labor. China alone seems to have an infinite quantity of labor. The global market phenomenon certainly plays a key role in the depression of labor's value, I think.
I believe that you've been arguing that the lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy itself. Is that correct?
Jack,
If your public library subscribes to EBSCO host, you'll be able to download it for free in a few months. Meanwhile, there's always my pre-publication "draft" on googledocs.
The argument against the lump-of-labor fallacy claim is more complex , nuanced and historical than is the claim itself. Therefore I would advise you to read the paper. It's not simply that the fallacy claim is itself a fallacy; it's also about the ideological axe the claim has to grind and the free rein that the economics discipline gives to the ideological axe grinders.
Sandy,
Thanks for the tip regarding the "draft" copy. It will take me days to comprehend the details. First and foremost, i didn't think to read labour as the amount of work to be done, but, instead, I read it as the amount of workers available to do the work. Still, doesn't the availability of laborers world wide effect the issue? Regardless of the amount of work to be done there seems to be an endless number of sources for yet cheaper available workers to do the work. It still amazes me that the printing industry in NY, once vibrant, is now little more than a jobbing industry due to the fact that even with shipping costs the Chinese can get the work done at a cheaper price.
First and foremost, i didn't think to read labour as the amount of work to be done, but, instead, I read it as the amount of workers available to do the work.
Indeed, Jack, one of the first things I noticed about the lump-of-labor fallacy claim was its semi-coherent, formulaic terminology. Usually, the tasks to be done would be called "work" and the activity of doing it would be called "labor". Usually, the first thing one would do when making a claim about what x's assumptions are would be to substantiate it with evidence from an actual argument presented by x. This particular fallacy claim appears to be exempt from the normal rules of argument and language, though, and that's why I thought it was revealing that it is so widely embraced by economists.
My tentative explanation is that the fallacy claim serves a didactic purpose in the early education of economists. As a textbook exercise, the fallacy claim may be instructive in alerting students to the dangers of making naive "ceteris paribus" assumptions.
The operative phrase is "textbook exercise." By the time students reach first year university, they have become accustomed to math exercises that are phrased as practical questions. So when they see an employment question in economics, they may indeed assume that it can be solved with a simple ratio in arithmetic. The teachable moment comes when the student is made to recognize his or her own "fallacious assumption." There's even a playful, "gotcha!" element to the initiation.
But next comes the big lie: that the textbook answer to the question of full employment (Say's Law, supply creates its own demand, yada yada) is any less abstract and "fallacious" than is the simple arithmetic one. In other words, just because the student jumps to the wrong conclusion doesn't, in itself, make the teacher's answer the right one -- except in ideological textbook exercises like the lump-of-labor fallacy claim.
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