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In economics, the lump of labour fallacy (or lump of jobs fallacy, fallacy of labour scarcity, or the zero-sum fallacy, from its ties to the zero-sum game) is the contention that the amount of work available to labourers is fixed. It is considered a fallacy by most economists, who hold that the amount of work is not static, although the history of the claim contains inconsistencies and anomalies. Another way to describe the fallacy is that it treats the demand for labour as an exogenous variable, when it is not. Historically, the term "lump of labour" originated to rebut the idea that reducing the number of hours that employees are allowed to labour during the working day would lead to a reduction in unemployment. The term has also been used to describe the commonly held beliefs that increasing labour productivity and immigration cause unemployment. Whereas some argue that immigrants displace domestic workers, others believe this to be a fallacy, arguing that such a view relies on a belief that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed, whereas in reality immigration increases the size of the economy, thus creating more jobs.〔John Bercow (Incoming assets: Why Tories should change policy on immigration and asylum ), Social Market Foundation, October 2005, accessed 16 September 2006〕〔Laurence Cooley, Macha Farrant and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah (Selecting wisely: Making managed migration work for Britain ), Institute for Public Policy Research, November 2005, accessed 16 September 2006〕 == Origins == The phrase was originally used to dismiss the claim that reducing the number of hours that employees are allowed to work in a day inevitably reduces unemployment. This claim is based on the following reasoning: # The number of hours of labour per day that are demanded by the market is constant. # Suppose we reduce the hours any single person can work in a day. # Now workers will produce fewer hours of labour. # The difference between the constant in (1) and the reduction of productivity in (3) must be made up by employing more workers. # Therefore the strategy in (2) increases employment rates. The lump of labour rebuttal argues that (1) is false. (1) is the basis of a straw man argument. In all historical real-world economies, the number of hours of labour per day has always been, and always is, subject to price variation. Thus (1) is an inadmissible claim to make in present-day economics when describing processes that are applicable to the real world. A common superficially similar yet unequivalent position to (1) is at times taken by credentialed economists: namely that at certain specific moments in time, in certain areas, the number of hours of labour per day that are demanded by the market does not vary to the threshold required for statistical significance. The Straw Man argument continues as follows: given that there is naturally an administrative cost to hiring more workers, there is no reason to expect that production will be unchanged. People may simply keep their present employees and work them harder for the same time, or find ways to cope with the reduced output. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lump of labour fallacy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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