David Autor replied to my earlier critique. Here is my response:
Dear David Autor,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful and prompt reply. I appreciate
your purpose to, as you say, "give a more nuanced interpretation
of the legitimate concerns surrounding the impact of rapid
technological [change] on job opportunities." My point was
actually that invoking the lump-of-labor canard poses a hindrance
rather than a help to achieving that laudable objective, which I
share. As I wrote, my intention was not so much to dispute your
arguments about technology and employment or even about the
lump-of-labor notion itself as to bring to your attention the
positive contribution that could be made by giving a fair hearing
to the actual views of those who are worried about technological
unemployment.
I didn't "miss" your point at all, instead I chose to avoid piling
a gratuitous critique of your conclusion on top of my main
criticism of your premise. But since you asked... I would
characterize your outlook and prediction as fitting neatly into
Keynes's category of "too easy, too useless a task if in
tempestuous seasons they [economists] can only tell us that when
the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." Your "too easy,
too useless" outlook and prediction flows seamlessly from the
unexamined premise of viewing labor as a commodity. Karl Polanyi
argued that such a description of labor is "entirely fictitious"
yet actual markets are based on this fiction.
An alternative description of labor is as a commons, or to use the
late Elinor Ostrom's term, a "common-pool resource." The words and
actions of ordinary workers, trade unions and even
machine-breakers make a great deal more sense from the perspective
of treating labor as a common-pool resource rather than as a
commodity. By contrast, the inane assumption attributed to workers
by their detractors is itself predicated on the unstated
assumption of the unquestionable commodity status of labor.
Profoundly different policy implications flow from the two
contrasting assumptions, as do fundamentally different predictions
about the future. It seems to me that a "more nuanced
interpretation of the legitimate concerns..." would seek to
include both the common-pool resource and the commodity
interpretations of labor rather than to exclusively feature the
latter while inadvertently disparaging the former by attributing
it to a belief in a spurious fallacy.
I'm only scratching the surface here. I could go into much more
detail and provide extensive reference on the question of viewing
labor as a commodity versus viewing it as a common pool resource
but life is short and I don't want to annoy you with unsolicited
"singing lessons."
Cheers,
Tom Walker
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