Thursday, July 16, 2009

Only So Much Boilerplate to Go Round

by the Sandwichman

The Economist again pimps its lump:
A commonly held view is that British youngsters have been displaced by the influx of youthful migrants from eastern Europe since 2004. But this is the "lump-of-labour" fallacy—that a job for a Polish cleaner means one fewer for a native worker...

A more likely explanation, though still disputed, is that the minimum wage was pushed up too much a few years ago.
No. This is the lump of labour fallacy. And this is how The Economist has reused and reused and reused the same propaganda boilerplate nineteen (19) times since 1993!

More than a year ago, I offered $10,000 to anyone who could refute my debunking of this perennial "lump-of-labour fallacy" canard and get their refutation published in a leading economics journal. And I repeated my offer and repeated it.

No takers. No nibbles, even. Why? Because if you actually look into The Economist boilerplate about "this is the lump of labour fallacy, yada, yada..." you'll quickly learn it is bogus. It is baseless name-calling and not a bona fide "economic fallacy".

1 comment:

Daro said...

Just rated up your comment at The Economist. If you don't say it there's a good chance no-one will. Sometime around 1999 that magazine got a new publisher and the contents took a hard, hard right turn. Not easy for an already conservative, pro-business publication but until then it had at least been informative and "out of the box" in thinking with an occasional nod at the need to consider the people who do the work in our economies. Then they turned into Bush cronies supporting the war and writing these sorts of sleight-of-hand articles such as you've exposed. Shame.