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by Kinrany 2152 days ago
You're explicitly saying that good jobs are zero-sum. Why do you think that?

It seems like a non-prediction that having more people with good education will enable new businesses.

2 comments

At any given moment there are a fixed number of jobs, and so a fixed number of "good jobs". I can grant that the number of good jobs isn't fixed on the scale of years. But people that want/need good jobs usually can't wait years for them to materialize. On the timescales that matter to individuals, the number of good jobs is fixed and so the competition for them is effectively zero-sum.

There also seems to be a scale issue when it comes to the availability of good jobs. That is, not all jobs can be good (i.e. high paying) and there is an essential order-of-magnitude difference between the number of high paying jobs and the number of low paying jobs required to make the economics work. So the proportion of good jobs is effectively fixed even on longer timescales.

>At any given moment there are a fixed number of jobs, ...

I think most economists would say that is called the lump of labour fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Yep, you are correct. Paul Graham writes in Hackers and Painters about how wealth is not zero-sum.

You can read more about it in his essay here: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Wealth doesn't map well to what we're talking about here. No economy can support an unbounded number of "high paying" jobs, for example. While wealth has gone up steadily since the world industrialized, a good (i.e. high paying) job is relative to the current standard of living and so wont be monotonic.
> No economy can support an unbounded number of "high paying" jobs, for example.

Why not? Is there some economic axiom that states this? Can wealth not continue to increase? And can't wealth be used to create "good" jobs?