Back in December, 2024, the Wall Street Journal carried a feature on an economics preprint research article showing surprising findings. David Autor and Daron Acemoglu lauded the article. “It’s fantastic,” said Acemoglu. “I was floored,” said Autor. The two economist appeared in a photo flanking the author, Aidan Toner-Rodgers. Turns out Autor was right. The paper was fantastic, but not in a good way.
This morning, The Wall Street Journal reported on the unraveling of the story:
“The paper was championed by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 economics Nobel, and David Autor. The two said they were approached in January by a computer scientist with experience in materials science who questioned how the technology worked, and how a lab that he wasn’t aware of had experienced gains in innovation. Unable to resolve those concerns, they brought it to the attention of MIT, which began conducting a review. MIT Says It No Longer Stands Behind Student’s AI Research Paper. …
“‘More than just embarrassing, it’s heartbreaking,’ Autor said.”
David Autor gullibility has been a recurring subject for the Sandwichman. In 2013, I called attention to a 2011 white paper by Autor and Lawrence Katz that claimed:
Leading economists from Paul Samuelson to Paul Krugman have labored to allay the fear that technological advances may reduce overall employment, causing mass unemployment as workers are displaced by machines. This ‘lump of labor fallacy’—positing that there is a fixed amount of work to be done so that increased labor productivity reduces employment —is intuitively appealing and demonstrably false.
There is no more confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the lump of labor claim than M.I.T. has in the research contained in Toner-Rodgers’s article. Contrary to Autor and Katz, it is the fallacy claim that is intuitively appealing, to economists, and demonstrably false. I’ve demonstrated the flimsiness of the claim and have just finished a new 10,000 word paper detailing its origin and history.
In 2014 Autor presented a paper at Jackson Hole, Wyoming containing the following claim:
Economists have historically rejected the concerns of the Luddites as an example of the ‘lump of labor’ fallacy, the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do.
This struck me as rather funny because if there is not “only a finite amount of work to do” there must be an infinite amount. This is Marc Andreessen level mathematical illiteracy. Andreessen blustered the “counterargument” to the alleged lump of labour fallacy “comes from economists such as Milton Friedman, who believe that human wants and needs are infinite, which means there is always more to do.” Human wants and needs can no more be “infinite” than can the amount of work to do. There are a finite number of people on earth and a finite number of hours in the day. No matter how much you extend the lenght working day and increase labour force participation the product will be a finite number.
Then in 2020, Autor was interviewed by NPR’s Planet Money at the American Economic Association conference in San Diego. They were asking economists “what is the most useful idea in economics?” Autor’s answer was… envelope, please… BIG SURPRISE! The lump-of-labor fallacy! In the interview, he rehearsed the standard boilerplate about there not being a “finite” amount of work to be done so we are not in danger of running out of jobs. Then he qualified that with the need for job training and productivity gains in the service sector so they won’t be WORSE jobs. One begins to wonder how such a sharp cookie could be bamboozled by fraudulent research.
Daron Acemoglu appears to be from the same Planet as Autor. In Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Acemoglu and his co-author James Robinson wrote that “Luddites” burned down the house of “John Kay, English inventor of the flying shuttle” in 1753. The fictional redresser, Ned Ludd, did not appear on the scene until November 1811. The story of the house burning down may be apocryphal. Early accounts of John Kay’s invention do not mention it. Later, some sources say that his son, or brother, Robert was the victim. Yet others say that his house was broken into and the machines in it smashed.
Here is a stop action video I made 12 years ago. David Autor is on the cover frame and then shows up fifth in the video
