More Feargus O’Connor (1844) on labour’s objections to machinery: And now, sir, let me state my principal objections to the unrestricted use of machinery. First, it places man in an artificial state, over which the best workman, the wisest man and most moral person, has no control. Secondly, while it leads to the almost certain […]
Crowding Out and the Social Overhead Costs of Labor Another strange twist in the convoluted lump-of-labor saga. Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor refuted the “Treasury View” — aka “crowding out” — in 1844. O’Connor’s tract is long-winded and sentimentalized an idyllic past but it also contains some cogent analysis of why workers were (and should still […]
Here’s a little economics lesson: supply and demand. You put the supply out there, and demand will follow. — Rick Perry, U.S. Secretary of Energy While the media is having fun at the expense of Secretary Perry’s asinine “economics lesson” it is worth pointing out that the very same publications that ridicule Perry perpetually peddle […]
Sandwichman in the FT Financial Times: “The minimum wage wars are heating up: A new study fails to prove its claim that Seattle wage floor hurts workers” by Martin Sandbu, at Free Lunch on FT Alphaville First, the numerical result struggles to pass an intuitive “smell test”. As the Angry Bear blog [cross posted at […]
There has been a lot of very good critique of the methodology of the University of Washington’s study of the minimum wage increase in Seattle. However, I want to repeat and emphasize a very simple point that jumps out. A static low-wage cutoff point, whether it be $19 or $100, automatically reduces the size of the […]
Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees […]
Richard Layard, How to Beat Unemployment, 1986: “If you ask the man in the street (not Wall Street) what has caused our unemployment, nine times out of ten he will say that it is machines displacing people. In fact for this reason he is often deeply pessimistic about whether we could ever have full employment […]
Unionists are not theorists; unionism is an eminently practical thing. — Robert F. Hoxie Theory and trade unionism are almost contradictory terms. — Edward M. Arnos In accordance with this theory it is held that there is a certain fixed amount of work to be done… David F. Schloss Paul Samuelson once wrote that […]
From Robert F. Hoxie, Trade Unionism in the United States, 1917: There is much scorn of unionists by economists and employers because of this lump of labor theory with its corollaries. This scorn is based on the classical supply and demand theory and its variants. Supply is demand. Increased efficiency in production means an increase of […]
“One Hundred Percent” Fake News No, uh-uh, false, wrong. Trump: I’m ‘100 percent’ willing to testify under oath — The Hill-2 hours ago Trump: I’m willing to testify under oath about Comey claims — CNN-3 hours ago Trump willing to testify to counter Comey under oath — Talk Media News-35 minutes ago Trump Says He’d […]