> Welcome back, Tom.  I have occasionally wondered what became of
> you. :-)

Hi Mike. Thanks.

> There's a -- what's the right word? "Lexical" I guess -- There's a
> lexical difficulty with much of your work on the "lump of labor

The other lexical or semantic difficulty with the lump is that the
labor in it refers to employment -- or the demand for labor -- while
in ordinary usage the word "labor" usually refers to the supply,
either individual or aggregate. The rhetorical success of the claim
owes everything to alliteration and repetition and nothing to
coherence or comprehension.

> Can we infer that your book is an entering wedge to that end?

I do indeed hope my book is an entering wedge in the reform of
political economic thought. I take on the notion of the rational
economic actor, "economic man," which in itself is not novel but I
also offer an alternative, "the wayfarer," who is at least as
conceptually parsimonious as Homo ec. but much better grounded both
empirically and in the narrative tradition.

One hopeful sign is the award of the Swedish Bank Prize to Elinor
Ostrom, whose analysis of the management of common pool resources
plays a key role in my rejoinder to the lump of labor fallacy claim.
I'll leave that as a teaser for now because I have to finish getting
ready for work.

-- 
Sandwichman
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