Re: The Bill of Gates fallacy

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>    Microsoft Timeline
>    Business @ the Speed of Thought
>    Remarks by Bill Gates
>    Georgetown University School of Business
>    March 24, 1999
>
>    QUESTION: During the course of the presentation, you mentioned job
>    reduction a number of times. While, as business students, we can all
>    appreciate what that means for the bottom line, have you put any
>    thought into what it means for society as a whole?
>
>    MR. GATES: Well, part of the lesson of economics is that there are
>    infinite demands for jobs out there, as long as you want class sizes
>    to be smaller, or entertainment services to be better, there's not a
>    lump of labor where there's a finite demand for a certain number of
>    jobs. And so, as efficiency changes, such as in food production, the
>    jobs shifted to manufacturing. As efficiencies were gained there,
>    those jobs moved into services. In fact, there's no shortage of things
>    that can be done. So, it's not like we're going to run out of jobs
>    here.
>
>
> Tom Walker

Well, we haven't, have we? The physiocrats in 1770 were really
worried about mass urban unemployment that would follow should the
agricultural share of the French labor force drop below 70%. Today 2%
(IIRC) of our labor force is engaged in agriculture as farmers or
farm laborers. And there are more gardeners, groundskeepers, and
growers of ornamental plants than there are members of the
agricultural labor force.

Getting people the skills to take new jobs as old kinds of jobs
vanish is, of course, a problem we are doing a bad job of dealing
with...


Brad DeLong