I read in article in The Economist on demographics and retirement. In it, the author cited the “Lump of Labor” fallacy as the driving motivation behind encouraging people to take early retirement. That’s cute, but it’s clear that neither the author nor the editor has ever held a job or run a business. The reason for encouraging early retirement is to fill senior, expensive job positions with younger, less expensive workers. This cuts down on salary, the employer side of health care costs and the need for matching pension contributions as a percentage of salary. Unfortunately it also cuts down on experience, productivity (as opposed to busyness), reduces the revenue stream for pension plan contributions and increases the costs of quality assurance. What’s a manager to do? It’s all so complex.
The error in the article seems like a basic and regrettable beginner mistake, especially for a journal that stakes a claim to knowledge of economics. My guess is they encouraged the people with a knowledge of economics to retire early and slashed quality assurance in order to maintain busyness. They need to provide content to fill the spaces around the advertising, after all, and in a pinch any content is better than none. But a guess isn’t very good, now is it? So I conducted an experiment.
Through methods and in a location I’m not at liberty to reveal, I obtained a representative sample of human beings and a number of predators that are known to eat humans. I also engaged the services of a tribe of cannibals. You’ll have to take my word for this that the legal requirements were met. I swear on a stack of glossy economics journals that this is true. One by one, I offered members of the sample to the predators and the cannibals. The only one they refused to eat was the one I’d classified as the economist, who has been retained in a breeding facility for further experimentation. The economist held the predators and cannibals at bay by imputing the Lump of Labor fallacy to their desire to eat him. This caused the predators to become nauseous and lose their appetites. They wandered off in disgust (one of the hyenas was traumatized, and had to receive psychiatric care). The cannibals, however, made him their king, with the full reproductive benefits that go along with royalty. Obviously it’s too soon to tell, but I suspect the next generation of cannibals will inherit his invulnerability to common predators. From that, it’s possible to extrapolate that somewhere, in the distant past, a gene for the quality of being an economist became part of the overall human genetic heritage. It’s only reasonable to infer as much. My experiment demonstrates inedibility and inedibility is definitely a contributing factor to the survival of the species. It confers an advantage in the reproductive competition. Delicious people will tend to be eaten, along with their equally delicious children. For protection, they’d have to turn to the economists and give them glossy magazines to write in the hopes that this gives the tribe something to use against cruel nature. This further suggests that an ability to detect the splendid genes of an economist conferred a survival advantage to non-economists. Hence our helpless lust in their presence and our willingness to, oh dear… This not that kind of blog.
As you can see, my first guess was dead wrong. Evolutionary psychology explains the presence of the apparent mistake in the article. It’s still a “mistake”, in the sense that the imputation made by the author was miles off the mark, but as an evolutionary strategy it’s perfect. Someone may cry, “Bullshit, Jim! You’re full of it!”, to which I can only harrumph in strained patience and point out that I have children, and have therefore demonstrated a capacity for not being eaten by either predators or cannibals.
No economists, predators or cannibals were harmed in the production of this post. Really.
