16 Jun 2026
The lump-of-labour fallacy:
I see posts saying AI is about to end the accountants.
Same line ran in the 80s about spreadsheets. The US now employs ~1.5 million accountants & auditors, up by more than half a million since.
That gap, between the confident prediction and what happened, has a name worth knowing before the headline runs again.
Economists call it the "lump of labour" - the idea that there's a fixed amount of work in the world, so if a machine takes a slice, there's less left for the rest of us. An Englishman, David Schloss, named that assumption in 1891 (yes, the panic is that old).
When VisiCalc & then Excel made financial maths almost free, the safe bet was that accountants were finished.
Two things happened instead.
The pure arithmetic got automated, and a different role, the bookkeeping clerks, took the hit. That part of the prediction came true.
But cheap calculation also meant you could run far more of it.. budgeting, forecasting, scenarios nobody bothered modelling when each one cost a week. A whole job barely existed before: the FP&A analyst who lives in those models. The judgment work grew faster than the arithmetic shrank, because the appetite for analysis turned out near-bottomless.
That's the pattern I keep coming back to with AI. It takes the dull tasks, and the work moves up to the parts that need judgment.
The same move the spreadsheet made, one rung higher.
Two honest caveats, because I'm not selling the easy version. That move up isn't automatic for the person displaced.. the clerk who lost the arithmetic is rarely the one who landed the forecasting seat. And maybe this time AI climbs the judgment rung too, with nowhere left above it.
I don't think so. But that's the real argument worth having.