Tuesday, July 22, 2014

"Will Automatons Take Our Economists' Jobs?"

For some reason, economists think it's a good idea to keep asking the same hackneyed question over and over again and keep giving the same hackneyed answers.

"Will automation take our jobs?" is a perennial favorite. The answer, of course is "technology creates more jobs than it destroys," "a cheap market will always be full of customers," "supply creates its own demand" and "CREATIVITY!" All of which is bullshit (or parrot droppings).

The real answer is that waste and war and immiseration can always be counted on to keep people toiling away no matter what. Hooray for waste and war and immiseration!

My question is a little different. What will it take to automate economists's jobs? It was observed long ago that one could teach a parrot to say "supply and demand." Here is my answer that doesn't require the frequent changing of the newspaper at the bottom of the cage:



Congenital ironists might want to note that the textbook lump enunciated by the "Keynesian" Samuelson is the self-same "supply creates its own demand" version of "Say's Law" of which Keynes remarked:
Thus Say’s law, that the aggregate demand price of output as a whole is equal to its aggregate supply price for all volumes of output, is equivalent to the proposition that there is no obstacle to full employment. If, however, this is not the true law relating the aggregate demand and supply functions, there is a vitally important chapter of economic theory which remains to be written and without which all discussions concerning the volume of aggregate employment are futile.
The "vitally important chapter of economic theory" that Keynes referred to was, of course, "the theory of employment to be worked out in the course of the following chapters..."

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