February 3rd, 2008 | 
Author: This post is one of a 4-part series on 4 ways to vote stupidly.
This series is based on this Reason Magazine article by Bryan Caplan, one of my favorite economists/writers.
Before proceeding, I wanted to mention a letter that Bryan Caplan received from a politician from the Virginia State Senate, confirming his unpopular assertion that voters are usually not rational (and that politicians are aware of it).
3. Make-Work Bias
A make-work bias (or Sisyphism) is the undervaluing of labor conservation. This is where producing the same amount of goods and services (or more) using less total labor is perceived as a bad thing which causes poverty.
This is often expressed as fear or hatred of technology, offshoring & outsourcing, downsizing, etc–anything that “takes away jobs”, even if those jobs no longer make sense.
The fallacy here is that people who are put out of work by technology or whatever are unable to find other uses for their talent. Keeping that obsolete Apple IIe around doesn’t make sense, so why would it make sense to keep paying for an obsolete task? The difference between an Apple IIe and a person, however, is that a person can do a lot of different tasks and can learn how to do new tasks. Not to mention that technology also creates new types of jobs. It’s not easy, and it’s not perfect, but it makes the most sense.
Here’s a graph that shows what’s been going on in the history of the U.S. economy.
Such is the case for any economy as it matures. As technology improves, you can bring in the same wheat harvest with only one dude on a tractor instead of 50 people breaking their backs with threshers. Then the same thing happens with manufacturing, leaving service as the largest part of the economy.
The dangers of make-work bias can be easily seen in some European countries and even in the lawsuit-happy USA, where it’s hard to fire an employee, and thus, companies are very wary about hiring in the first place. The result is higher unemployment.
This works great for everyone as long as the economy grows. If it doesn’t grow, the service sector is the one that is squeezed the most.
But one thing that doesn’t make the economy grow is make-work.
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yeah except people aren’t apple IIs. Sure you can come off all high and mighty about how people “adapt” but a computer can be thrown away and replaced with a better one. The old computer doesnt have dreams, wants, a family to feed. Groves you live in this dream world were people can just be used and abused. Not everyone is as smart or gifted or lucky as you pal
I’d argue – totally out of my ass of course – that the trend toward a service economy isn’t actually a maturation of the market, and it’s just another model of the same sort of make-work. There’s creative service work and there’s knowledge work, which of course we’re all familiar with, but most service jobs are distribution jobs. I don’t see a difference between inefficiencies in manufacturing and inefficiencies in distribution over the long run. If we can’t employ people making it, we’ll employ them breaking it, fixing it, painting it, serving it in a low-cut top, shipping it, guarding it, and reselling it at markup. I call bullshit on referring to inefficiencies in manufacturing as “make-work” and inefficiencies in distribution as “service sector jobs”.
Then we’re all in agreement? Matt (by way of his favorite economists) is full of shit.
minywheats you are saying that if you were replaced by some sort of superintelligent armed guard robot from the future that runs on orphan blood, you would never be employed again? Somehow all those threshers are out of work, and yet we are at 5% unemployment…
David’s premise is an interesting one, but the argument isn’t about inefficiencies by sector, but overall. It doesn’t matter where the inefficiency exists, the long-term trend is to reduce them. It just happens chronologically that service follows manufacturing which follows agriculture. (i.e. I don’t need to farm anymore just to survive, so I’ll work on something else, etc.) Your issue seems to be a semantic one. Also, it’s harder to improve effeciencies on services through technology alone (by definition created and consumed simulataneuously). It certainly can be done, but there’s a point of diminishing returns (see hyper-intelligent alien robot from the future above). Process can be improved, but “replacing” people is difficult.
It comes down to this: Does it make sense to stop using printing machines because it takes more people to write the same amount of books by hand, and thus, employs more people? I submit that it makes no sense, and you are exhibiting make-work bias if you think it makes sense.
well this is the problem then, to many stupid people having 10 kids and smart people having 1 or 0
There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.
I think minywheats just volunteered for sterilization.
fine by me, kids are the leeches in america, now if I do volunteer I should be able not to pay school tax ever again
Ah, now the objectivist in you comes out. Come to the dark side, minywheats, you know you want to.