ABSTRACT
One very practical consequence of job-market arithmetic is full employment, 1 and following closely on its heels are shorter working hours for everyone. If all the buying and selling of jobs in our small model nation passes through a single electronic marketplace, its computer can easily manage things so that every job buyer who goes there will be presented with a full spectrum of jobs. All we need to do to assure this “astonishing” result is to instruct the computer to cut the work it is asked to provide employers into the right number of pieces. We think it astonishing that there could be literally full employment in a job market economy because we have never had that elegant service performed for us. 2 Actually, from the computer’s point of view, the job-sizing task is an algorithmic one; that is to say, the computer will use a completely specified mathematical procedure that will be guaranteed to produce the desired result every time. Let us see what algorithms the job-market computer might use in a simple case.
