> That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job. It's effectively a form of the broken window fallacy [0]. You d

> That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job. It's effectively a form of the broken window fallacy [0]. You don't actually have a closed system when you say a "job was removed". The company one way or another got more efficient - more widgets were manufactured per $ spent. It might be tiny but this saving was then passed on to every downstream purchaser of the widgets who, with that left over money .... could employ someone else to do something. By the time you add all the net effects back to regain a "closed system", economic theory says you actually have more jobs. But the key here really is that this doesn't account for temporal effects, and especially when there is rapid disruptive change, you can absolutely have a huge dislocation and mismatch of labor supply / demand in the economy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window