The most reassuring argument about AI and jobs quietly explains why Gen Z can’t get one

Smart people disagree on the AI job apocalypse, and even the prophets of white-collar doom—Dario Amodei and Sam Altman—have walked back their predictions. But the best explanation for why AI won’t kill off jobs across the economy comes, perhaps unexpectedly, from a Dutch software company that sells its products to law firms. It also explains why the entry-level market hiring struggle is painfully real. Wolters Kluwer is a 183-year-old Dutch information services company that sells AI-powered software to law firms. In a piece published earlier this month, the company cited two economic concepts: the “lump of labor fallacy” and the Jevons Paradox. The “lump of labor fallacy” was coined by English economist David Frederick Schloss in 1891, as he noted that many workers and employers believed there was a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy. You can see this everywhere over the past four years, even among the AI kingpins such as Amodei and Altman, as they warned that if AI eliminates a category of tasks, the workers who performed those tasks would simply be displaced with nowhere to go. Wolters Kluwer alluded to the fallacy by noting that AI is freeing up attorneys to spend more time on strategy, counseling, and judgment-driven work, but it’s not isn’t resulting in smaller legal teams. “Legal teams are increasingly looking for junior professionals who arrive AI-trained and ready to work alongside these tools,” it said. “They need people who can validate AI output, manage workflows, and apply their expertise to the outputs rather than the inputs.” The Jevons Paradox is an even older bit of economic lingo. Coined in 1865 by the English economist William Stanley Jevons, it has been invoked regularly by Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok to argue that AI will create more jobs, not less. Amodei even referenced it himself in May while retreating from his own AI jobpocalypse claims. Th