Why there are more labor economists than laborers

This is a good time to dust off an old concept of mine: the academic ratio. Roughly speaking, this is the inverse of the universal limiting ratio (rigidly adhered to in nature) between a subject and the number of people studying it. The limiting ratio is very large - consider for example, that there was only one Joyce but there are already a million Joyceans, one Jesus Christ but a million Christian theologians, and of course, more labor economists than there are laborers! Of course, it's all mountains of uninspired hackwork but that's what academia's about, baby - if you ain't got game, write a paper about it instead.

The forces of mass psychology control the dynamics of the actual ratio at any point in time. In particular, the dynamics follow an inverse law - an academic discipline grows at a rate inversely proportional to the current ratio. That explains why labor economics is slowing down but development economics is not - there are many more poor people in the world than there are laborers in developed countries.