On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 01:21 PM, Mark Baugher wrote:
>
> what Paul Krugman thinks today's democracy that's "being forged in the
> hands of the people" looks like.
Krugman has moved somewhat to the left since the late 1990s when he ridiculed
William Greider, author of One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global
Capitalism , as "an accidental theorist" ("All work and no play makes William
Greider a dull boy."). As Krugman described his essay:
>
> The title essay in this collection was an effort to take on an old
> misunderstanding that has lately experienced a revival of popularity: the
> idea (sometimes referred to as the “lump of labor” fallacy) that there is
> only a limited amount of work to be done in the world, and that as
> productivity rises there is therefore a reduction in the number of jobs
> available. The idea has a surface plausibility from the experience of
> individual industries: It is indeed true, for example, that America’s
> railroads handle more freight now than they did in 1980, but employ barely
> a third as many workers. Doesn't it follow that the same fate may await
> all jobs, that as workers become more productive the economy will need
> ever fewer of them? It is hard to explain that this involves a fallacy of
> composition, that the effect of a productivity increase in a given
> industry on the number of jobs in that industry is very different from the
> effect of a productivity increase in the economy as a whole on the total
> number of jobs.
>
This so-called "lump-of-labor fallacy" was a late 19th century early 20th
century version of what Marx called THE THEORY OF COMPENSATION AS REGARDS THE
WORKPEOPLE DISPLACED BY MACHINERY (
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S6 ). The
innovation of the fallacy claim was to impute to critics of capitalism the
absurd notion that "there is only a fixed amount of work to be done." "Why, the
amount of potential work is UNLIMITED," crow the defenders of capital. Without
getting into too much historical and "economics" detail, the fallacy claim
originated with the pro-employer propagada press and was a throwback to
discredited classical political economy arguments based on the "wages fund
doctrine." Neo-classical economics of the Marshall school had gone far beyond
that in an almost Marxist (or Marxish) direction. It is telling that late 20th
century economics ignored the economics of the early 20th century and adopted
the obsolete formulas of the propaganda press.
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