It isn't everyday the Sandwichman gets the opportunity to praise Lawrence H. Summers. Back in February, Summers tweeted, "The inverse of Say's Law holds today: Lack of demand creates lack of potential supply." At a full employment event put on last week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Summers elaborated on what he meant by that. Starting at about minute 22:20 of the video, Summers eviscerates the lump-of-lobster fallacy.
What is the lump-of-lobster fallacy? Samuel Brittan was wont to invoke the lump-of-labor fallacy in his columns at the Financial Times but occasionally the compositors would tamper with the copy, once rendering the old canard as the lump-of-lobster fallacy. It seems to me that this was an appropriate reductio ad absurdum of the nonsense claim that unspecified persons believed there was "a fixed amount of work to be done."
As the Sandwichman wrote back in January (Yasraeh's Law), "I have described the lump-of-labor fallacy claim as 'an inverted Say's Law on steroids.'"
1 comment:
Sandwichman:
Ditto on Summers. I still do not trust him.
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