Talk:Lump of labour fallacy

message: Lump of labour fallacy → Lump of labor - Change "labour" to "labor" because this is America. Remove "fallacy" from the title because it is POV. LevelCheck 01:56, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The Economist's definition of lump of labour fallacy, complete with fallacy in the phrase 132.205.15.43 03:47, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The Sandwichman's language poem on the Economist's obsession with the lump of labor fallacy, complete with Only So Much Work to Go Round in the title 142.179.124.112 03:10, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

text: If that is your counter-argument, I'd encourage you to study the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. Jonathunder 22:53, 2005 Apr 18 (UTC)
*Oppose. The article is describing a fallacy, so removing the word from the title would be pointless: if you want to write a new article about the related term Lump of labor go right ahead. Also each of the linked references uses the non-US spelling, so this would make it inconsistent. By the way what is the "this" you are saying is America? Surely not Wikipedia, because we've had that tedious argument entirely too many times. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 08:02, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
*Oppose. If it's a fallacy, it should be called one. The original editor used the spelling "labour", which is reason enough to keep it, since the topic is not specific to any one country. --Angr/comhrá 09:54, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Requested move

message: A full two paragraphs is spent discussing Tom Walker's "rebutal" of the relatively common position that work-week restrictions are not effective against unemployment.  I was instantly left wondering, who is Tom Walker.   Tom walker turns out to be a social policy activist   (Yes, I'm pretty sure I have the right Tom Walker).  His rebutal has not to my knowledge been published in a peer reviewed journal --and my opinion, as a PhD candidate, is that it is riddled with enough errors of logic as to not even merit consideration as reasonable dissent.  Unfortunately, Mr. Walker is so obscure, I can't find anyone who has taken the time to critique him in a peer reviewed journal either--which isn't surprising given that his paper was never published in an accepted journal.  As much as I'd like to include some real argument against the commonly held position of economists, I don't think this Tom Walker stuff passes muster to merit inclusion.  I intend to delete the paragraphs relating to him.  I invite people to come forward with information suggesting that
* Tom Walker is actually a figure of merit, qualified to have so much prominence in this article.
* has published his rebutal in a generally accepted peer reviewed journal 
Also, if people have any replacement suggestions.  Please speak-up.  --Pearlg 06:58, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The Office of the President of the Republic of Korea and the Industrial Relations Department of the State of Queensland, Australia apparently have no problem's with the merits of Tom Walker's scholarship. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.180.174.199 (talk • contribs) 06:29, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  (see: "Why Economists Dislike a Lump of Labor," Review of Social Economy, September 2007) (copied for IP editor) CRETOG8(t/c) 03:20, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Concerns over Tom Walker

message: I'm Tom Walker, author of the critique of the alleged lump of labour fallacy. My critique was indeed not published in a peer review journal. It was published in a book, Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah M. Figart (Routledge, 2000). Many of the articles in that book were originally published in a special issue of the Review of Social Economy. My chapter was an invited contribution to expand the scope of the collection. Obviously, the editors thought the article had merit.
Having read through the current edition of the Wikipedia lump of labour article, I am content not to have my analysis associated with it in any way. In its present state, the facts presented in the article are almost entirely without substantiation, beginning with the "also calleds" and continuing through the ad hoc "history" of the fallacy's origins.
As for this "discussion", the contributor calling his or herself "Pearlg" claims to be a PhD candidate and makes sweeping allegations about my article being "riddled with logical error" along with several comments questioning my competence. If this is the standard of discourse that passes for editorial discussion on Wikipedia, I'm sure I can find a more edifying way to waste my time. --216.232.204.73 21:19, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Reply from Tom Walker

message: Hi, I'm merging in material from Zero-sum fallacy:
:A more controversial example goes as follows.  Green politics postulates a zero-sum game regarding the finite supply of fossil fuels available to mankind.  Activities that utilize these resources (coal power, internal combustion, etc) are believed to be irreversibly depleting them and precipitating an energy crisis. Opponents to this school of thought call this example a zero-sum fallacy because they believe that increased fossil fuel use leads to research into more efficient utilization as well as creating more of an economic incentive for locating additional resources.  This respectively has the results of lower per capita usage and increased supply.
:The contradiction to this fallacy is sometimes summed up in the phrase 'rather than arguing over who gets how much of the pie, increase the size of the pie'.
This seems a little bit controversial, since "opponents to this school of thought" do not argue that fossil fuel resources are not finite, only that they can be stretched infinitely thin.
Actually, they *do* argue that fossil fuel sources are not finite -- their arguments are structured along the line of Zeno's Paradox  -- but they fail to recognize that it is more properly called Zeno's Fallacy.  They also misrepresent the "Green' position, which is not a fatalistic view that we will inevitably run out of resources and then we're screwed, but rather that we need to account for such depletion and change our ways *now*, to avoid great suffering.  The difference between the Greens and their opponents is not so much that the former are committing a fallacy, but that they put a greater value on avoiding suffering -- economists are taught, very wrongly, that such valuations are irrational.
I'm leaving it here in case somebody thinks it's worth cleaning up and adding. Sympleko (Συμπλεκω) 18:40, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This is not an example of the Lump of Labor Fallacy since, according the article, the LOLF is a specific misconception about the labor market. It's also not an obvious analogy, at least not for me. Jone951 (talk) 05:46, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Energy example 

message: While it's probably true that the total number of work posts is not strictly inversely proportional to the number of working hours per worker, it seems incredible that restricting working hours would even lower employment. That sounds like a gross exaggeration to me. Does anybody have any statistics showing what actually happened in countries where working hours were reduced? Army1987 14:46, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  We need empirical data 

message: Counter-intuitive as it may seem, it is ideed possible that a poorly designed, badly administered policy for restricting working hours could lower employment. But it's not easy to measure the effects of one policy like work time reduction because so many other discrete variables that also effect employment are changing at the same time.
Logeay and Schreiber Evaluating the Effectiveness of the French Work-Sharing Reform, unpublished version 2003 reported a significant boost in employment in France following the 2000 reform package that included the 35-hour week. But in a subsequent analysis, Schreiber Did work-sharing work in France? unpublished version 2005 argued that the shorter hours component of that package was not responsible for the employment gains. Rather, he claimed, his model showed that limitation on hours actually held back the employment gains that in fact resulted from greater scheduling flexibility. One possible criticism of Schreiber's argument, however, is that it treats the components of a package as if they could have been implemented separately.
Crépon and Kramarz Employed 40 hours or Not-Employed 39: Lessons from the 1982 Workweek Reduction in France, 2002 found job losses for individuals from a reduction in hours, this time attributing the negative effect to the hours reduction, even though again the hours reduction was part of a package that also included an increase in the minimum wage to offset the hours reduction. Again, their methodology could be criticized because the assumptions they made in building their model may have had more to do with the results they obtained than any actual effect of the hours reduction.
When looking at published studies, it is important to keep in mind publication bias. The studies by Logeay and Schreiber and by Crépon and Kramarz both employ methods and assumptions that could be sharply criticized. Whether or not that criticism is fatal to publication may depend on whether the resulting conclusions confirm or challenge the prevailing skepticism of economists toward reduced working time, as Card and Krueger showed with regard to studies of the employment effects of raising the minimum wage. To publish results that contradict the accepted wisdom you may have to prove something that can't be proved. 142.179.124.112 03:00, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Empirical data 

message: The following part needs rework or deleteion:
"The consequence is that we might be able to take $100 of your money, use it to economically create $1,000 of value in the world, and return $200 of value back to you--in that case, nobody loses anything."
I guess pigs might fly also. Let's say you borrow my $100 and use it in this way: You buy a piece of wood for 50$ and hire some guy to carve it into something useful for 50$, like a wooden IPod-stand. He has his own tools and place of business. Then you're somehow able to sell this to some idiot at ebay for 1100$. Have you now "created" 1000$ of value? Now you return 200$ to me. So I'm happy and you're happy. Your ebay idiot now has 1100$ less to spend at caffe lattes, doesn't that mean lost business opportunity for somebody?
The next week 10 other guys notice what you got for it at ebay and they decide they can do the same thing, and wooden IPod-stands only get 150$ at ebay. Your 1100$ customer wakes up and smells his latte. He never admits to another soul that he paid 950$ too much for his IPod-stand, but he understands that the ebay game is not of the non-zero-sum kind.
Geir Gundersen 07:34, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So the mice lose, so it's still zero sum.  What's your point?  The banking sector is mostly about taking small amounts of lots of people's money in return for short term gain.  It is taking wealth from the future and will eventually collapse without a new source to extract.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.236.80.140 (talk) 00:04, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Economics 

message: As a thought experiment to test this theory, what if robots that were just as capable as humans were relatively cheap to produce? Sure, there will be some "social" jobs for humans, but it's difficult to see this providing sufficient employment for everyone. After all, many people are not very good at being sociable (spending their day writing and editing Wiki Talk comments, for example.)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.233.0.202 (talk) 21:48, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The theory's ground is economy, so you're somehow right, you simply think needs-driven politics while almost everyone think economy and even forgot what "politics" means, let alone "employment". --2A01:CB11:13:D700:D186:445D:41E4:DA1D (talk) 13:34, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Robots

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This was removed. 
Some economics studies have noted criticism and complexities with the fallacy claim.
Benjamin (talk) 22:41, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Studies  

message: Again I think a vote should be made. — Preceding unsigned comment added by OjuzKiopo (talk • contribs) 08:26, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voting for renaming [[Lump of labour fallacy]] → [[Scarcity of labour]] or [[Lump of labour fallacy|Labour scarcity]] 

message: The beginning of the article
calls “fixed-pie” thinking a flat out misconception. That’s an insane metaphysical assertion. Simply put there is NO wealth on Earth, because wealth is a projected concept. 0 is a fixed number. Same as if we assign value (as most people do) to some sort of resource, which would almost certainly exist in a limited quantity on Earth. 2001:56A:FCFE:E200:BD40:8579:3AB2:8E37 (talk) 12:33, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Don’t think we should just take Economists’ word as gospel and just assume there’s an infinite amount of wealth in the world…