In the Fed's workhorse macro model, FRB/US, the sensitivity of inflation to monetary policy is extremely flat. Hikes equal to 100 basis points, held over a year, only leads to a slowdown in a reduction of the price level of X percent. The peak impact of policy on inflation occurs X months after the increase in the policy rate. 

Note to self: investigate whether "excess demand" or "excess employment" better describes the behavior of prices over 2020-23. Excess demand could refer to the amount that households want to buy at a given point in time, which departed notably on a month-to-month basis with employment over this period. 

In Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847, Alexander Somerville provides a detailed account of famine conditions across Ireland in a series of short articles. A topic therein comprising this post is the question of whether it makes sense to employ labor in an unproductive way to avoid an idle portion of the population.

According to the book, households are highly land-constrained, not labor constrained. I.e., they would be better off if they had more land to farm ("On the value of small farms" pp. 165-171). Evidently, a matter worth debate was the smallest amount of land required to sustain a household. Meanwhile, agricultural productivity was higher where the population density was lower. "Irish agriculture is more profitable where the dense population is thinned out." ("Letter from Rathkeale" p. 133)  However, Somerville questions whether policy has a right to shift a portion of the population away from agriculture: 

The right is not to be found even in the expediency which political economy would suggest, of providing a larger quantity of national food at a cheaper cost, because the national loss of having so many millions of the population dependent on charity and national taxes, and exposed to famine, and ever on the verge of social disorder, is nationally a loss far exceeding the benefits derived from the larger quantity of national food produced at a cheaper cost.

Echoes in 2023 of economists and policy debates considering whether robots and artificial intelligence would upend the labor market.