system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Historians often argue that the Black Death resulted in higher wages for workers. Is this the lump of labor fallacy, or do they have more sophisticated models in mind?
gpt
I can't speak to what exactly they have in mind, but you don't need to commit the lump of labor fallacy in order to think wages would rise. If we think about an agrarian society where the main "capital" input to production is land, then if we assume a concave production function in land and labor, then since land is in fixed supply, a decline in labor would raise the marginal product of labor. If workers are paid their marginal products (big if, especially in those days), then wages would rise.