Lump of labour fallacy

In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a finite amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy. It is also known as the lump of jobs fallacy, fallacy of labour scarcity, fixed pie fallacy, and the zero-sum fallacy—due to its ties to zero-sum games. The term "fixed pie fallacy" is also used more generally to refer to the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. This and other zero-sum fallacies can be caused by zero-sum bias.

The term originated to rebut the idea that reducing the number of hours employees are allowed to labour during the working day would lead to a reduction in unemployment. The term is also commonly used to describe the false belief that increasing labour productivity, automation, immigration, or women's participation in the workforce causes an increase in unemployment. The facts show that just like the amount of labor is not fixed, neither is the size of the economy (fixed pie fallacy) and as more work is done, the economy grows.

Automation/technological change

While many workers fear that automation or artificial intelligence will take their jobs, history has shown that when jobs in some sectors disappear, jobs in new sectors are created. One example is the United States, where a century of increasing productivity and technological improvements changed the percentage of Americans employed in the production of food from 41% of the workforce in 1900 to 2% in 2000. This change did not result in large-scale unemployment, because workers found jobs in newly created industries (like farm equipment manufacturing).