Make-Work Bias at Work

I am a Research Assistant at Darden Institute for Business and Society, where we work on a constant, varied stream of research projects and ideas headed by Darden faculty. One of the current projects involves the interactions of racial bias and implementation of AI. I was asked to take the survey twice to check for errors, both last week and again this past Friday. When I first reached the question asking if I would rather employ a human or purchase equivalently efficient software, I believe that it was a question beyond economics. Surely, I thought, in a situation where the prices and output are the same, this question merely measures whether I’d rather deal with a glitchy computer or remember another office birthday. After all, most of my Econ classes focus on efficiency, and there was no foreseeable deadweight loss in my mind. Therefore, I chose to hire the person, weakly preferring to help his hypothetical family make their hypothetical ends meet. However, after last Thursday’s class on Caplan’s reading, I took the survey again with a different perspective. I realized that purchasing software over a human employee then freed up that person to go and work in other industries, allowing for increased productivity across the economy overall. I was exhibiting a make-work bias by choosing a person, as I underestimated how conservation of labor can actually be beneficial. Furthermore, the increase in my Economics knowledge did make a tangible impact on my choices, at least within this survey. This was not due to the ideological or self-serving biases, because neither my future prospects or belief systems have shifted in the last week. Therefore, this is evidence that my own Economics training is impacting the way that I think, slowly moving away from the systematically biased beliefs of the public.