Economics can provide useful tools for thinking about issues but those tools can also be misused and transformed into ready-made answers that enable us to avoid thinking about issues. One of the tell-tale danger signs that this is happening is when an analytical perspective gets reduced to an aphorism and the aphorism becomes an article of faith. "People's desires are insatiable." "Automation creates more jobs than it destroys." "The amount of work is not fixed."
People's desires are indeed "insatiable" but not necessarily for things produced and traded in the market. To a certain extent, material goods can be substituted for spiritual desires. For example, war can be substituted for piety. But those substitutions are often pathological. There is indeed a limit to how much we can poison ourselves. Death. Automation creates more jobs... perhaps. but to paraphrase H.L. Mencken "which jobs? and in what order?" It is instructive to trace the origins of the aphorisms. The "creates more jobs than it destroys" cliche appears to originate in the 1930s. The first sighting I can locate states, "science creates many times more jobs than it destroys." It's in the proceedings of the annual convention of the Association of Life Insurance Presidents. The full statement reads, "The mere fact that all European countries now support four times the population that they had, or could in any way have supported in 1800, is proof enough that in the long run science creates many times more jobs than it destroys.." Uhmmm. Raise your hands all those who believe that quadrupling the population is still a good ides. See what I mean? Context counts. The amount of work is not fixed? Is that a theoretical truth or an empirical one? U.S employment in September 2010 was 200,000 less than it was in December 1999. Does that mean the fact is a fallacy? Bill McBride at Calculated Risk says its a "lump of labor fallacy" to think that older people remaining in the workforce past retirement take jobs that might otherwise employ young, unemployed people. What's the history of the fallacy claim? I have commented in an open letter to Bill McBride in "Older Workers and the PHONY Lump of Labor Fallacy<http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2010/12/older-workers-and-phony-lump-of-labor.html>" at Ecological Headstand. On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 11:54 PM, Keith Hudson <[email protected] > wrote: > But we're already fast entering a different situation. The cost of energy > (as a proportion of personal expenditure) is now rising remorselessly, there > have been no uniquely new consumer goods for the past 30 years or so, and > automation is now biting into mass employment (and thus also forcing down > average real wages for the past 30 years). We (in the West) are now becoming > as securely locked into our present urbanized way of life with all its > limitations as all well-developed agricultural cultures were locked into > theirs in Eurasia and Central America. > -- Sandwichman
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
