Sandwichman — The Poverty of Fallasophy

Ryan Avent stumbles into the hole of the "lump of labor fallacy," along with "Say's law."

A chief reason to reduce work time is to share productivity gains that make increased leisure possible rather than increasing owner's share including leisure potential.

The problem is that according to neoclassical economics workers who are not employed have acted in the labor market to choose leisure over unemployment!

Angry Bear
The Poverty of Fallasophy
Sandwichman

Sandwichman cites his previous post, The Outlaws of Political Economy, destroying the notion that "the lump of labor fallacy" was anything but capitalist concoction in the first place.

Paradoxically, for old school vulgarians there both is and is not a certain quantity of work to be done. There is a certain quantity of work to be done when it comes to disparaging the idea that workers might increase wages their through collective action:

"There is a certain quantity of work to be done, and a certain number of hands to do it; if there be much work and comparatively few hands, wages will rise; if little work and an excess of hands, wages will fall. It is self-evident that combinations and strikes cannot alter this law. They can neither increase capital, nor diminish population; and, therefore, it is utterly impossible, in the very nature of things, that they ever can procure a permanent rise of wages."

But there isn't a certain amount of work when it comes to explaining why such foolish action isn't even necessary: 

"There is, say they, a certain quantity of labour to be performed. This used to be performed by hands, without machines, or with very little help from them... The principle itself is false. There is not a precise limited quantity of labour, beyond which there is no demand. Trade is not hemmed in by great walls, beyond which it cannot go. By bringing our goods cheaper and better to market, we open new markets, we get new customers, we encrease the quantity of labour necessary to supply these, and thus we are encouraged to push on, in hope of still new advantages. A cheap market will always be full of customers."

The most significant portion of this post is about the purpose of bourgeois economics itself:

Perusing Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy from 1894 alerted me to the odd interaction of a pair of distinctions. The first distinction was between the study of "what is" and "what ought to be." The second distinction was between "economic science" (or "economics") and "political economy." Economic science presumably distinguished itself from political economy by its strict focus on describing "what is" rather than on prescribing "what ought to be."

Palgrave's explains the latter distinction to have been at least partly motivated by the confusion that arose over just what kind of laws -- legal or natural -- so-called "laws of political economy" were. Even after the attempt at rebranding, however:

"...even well-educated persons still occasionally speak of "laws of political economy" as being "violated" by the practice of statesmen, trades-unions and other individuals and bodies. 

You can't "break" scientific laws. They are simply generalized descriptions of fact. A flying airplane doesn't break the law of gravity. It conforms to a more comprehensive complex of physical laws. The law of gravity isn't the only law.

Palgrave's Dictionary further noted that the "great complexity and variety of circumstance which surround every economic problem are such as to render the enunciation of general laws, on a large scale, barely possible and if possible barely useful."

So the whole "positive" economics rigamarole wasn't just about methodological rigor. It was a purification ritual to rid the political economist of the stigma of dogma. Economists who invoke the violation of so-called laws aren't only forfeiting any legitimate claim to economic science. They are contaminating their profession with atavistic hokum.

Burn this into your brain and throw it at people who cite so-called natural laws.

Econospeak
The Poverty of Fallasophy
Sandwichman

I have previously pointed out historically that the theological world view of the Middle Ages began breaking down at the time of the Renaissance, when the Great Chain of Being began to be replaced by modern science, a project that was strongly advanced with Newton's laws. Then the older arguments based on revelation, divine providence and other dogmas gradually fell apart. They needed to be replaced and the Scholastic not in of "natural law" was used to fill the gap between laws guaranteed by the divinity with laws discovered by reason.

IN the 18th century the educated were moving away from the theological explanation of cosmology to Deism, the idea that the Creator set the world in motion and then let it unfold like clockwork. A believe this to be related to the not of an "invisible hand" in the form of "natural forces." While there is no evidence that Adam Smith thought this according to Smith biographer Gavin Kennedy (personal communication), the idea was in the air and it was only short step from Smith's invisible hand to economic laws similar to Newton's laws. Even Marx sought "iron laws."

Owing to the brilliant success of science evidence through technology, all disciplines sought to emulate Newtonian physics in "discovering" what were claimed to be "laws of nature." But, as Sandwichman observes, actual laws of nature hold universally, which is intrinsic to the definition. They cannot be violated. If violation were possible, then the assertion of law would not hold logically.

This reveals conventional economics as dogma rather than science, ideology rather than reason. The ideology of conventional economics is bourgeois liberalism that justifies ownership of the means of production controlling livelihood, primitive accumulation based on enclosure of the commons and privatization of public assets, and rent extraction as "meritocracy and "just deserts."

But there is an out for the failure to discover iron-clad natural laws in economics and social science. There are no iron laws regulating behavior. Humans, the elements of social systems under the assumption of methodological individualism, are not like atoms that are the elements of physical systems. Assuming atom-like behavior does not make it so. But where the law is not known (yet) deterministically, it's effects can be "detected" stochastically as regularities expressed as probability functions and improves through application of Bayesianism.

It's a self-serving load of BS promoting bourgeois liberalism.