Tag Archives: lump of labor fallacy

A common right-wing grievance is that undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants are taking all the jobs. In particular, that they’re stealing jobs from native-born Americans. What’s the evidence? If it were true that immigrants were stealing jobs from native born Americans, then if you plotted labor force participation by native- and foreign-born over time, they would have a reciprocal relationship. As non-native participation rose, native...

“Lump” and “labor” are two words… From: Tom Walker Sent: October 27, 2021 3:49 PM To: scott.a.wolla@ Subject: Lump of labor fallacy Dear Scott, I just came across your article, “Examining the Lump of Labor Fallacy Using a Simple Economic Model,” from November of last year on the St. Louis Fed website. I have done quite a bit of research on this topic and I was dismayed to see the old canard of a fallacy recycled without any...

The lump-of-labor fallacy CLAIM is the wage-fund doctrine in disguise. The fallacy claim's conclusions about the ultimate futility of workers' demands are indistinguishable from the doctrine's conclusions. Only the premise from which those conclusions are deduced has been altered. Instead of asserting a certain quantity of work to be done, the fallacy claim attributes that fixed assumption to a designated scapegoat: workers, unions, populists. The claimants' own assumptions are left...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]For the (Probably Not) Last Time, the DREAMers Are Not Taking Your Jobs: I believe that a lot of well meaning people genuinely think this, and they deserve an explanation as to why they are wrong rather than just getting yelled at on humanitarian grounds.