My dad spent a good portion of his debate with William Jeter on Monday night talking about the problem of rising gas prices.
Underlying their discussion was a fundamental question about the relationship between the economy and the environment: are we facing a future in which oil, metals, and other raw-material resources are going to become increasingly scarce – and thus increasingly expensive? If so, the only way we can maintain our standard of living is by investing in technologies that will enable us to do more with less. We have to figure out how to drive our cars and light our houses without burning fossil fuels, how to grow our food without depending on petrochemical inputs, and how to manufacture products that don’t require us to mine new materials.
If not – if resources like oil, copper, and iron are going to remain relatively cheap over time – then maybe it makes sense, at least from an economic perspective, to stay our current course and not worry too much about making our economy more resource-efficient.
Economists are a gambling sort of people, and twenty-eight years ago, two of them placed a friendly bet on this very question. Paul Elrich, of Stanford University, bet Julian Simon, another noted economist, that the prices of five metals – copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten – would rise between 1980 and 1990.
Elrich lost the bet. The discovery of new deposits of the metals in question outpaced the growth of demand, causing prices to fall over the course of the 1980s. And so, the story of the Elrich-Simon bet became a favorite example for people who like to argue that the world is in no danger of resource scarcity.
What few people realize is that if the Elrich-Simon bet had been extended to today – if it had been a twenty-eight-year bet rather than a ten-year bet – Elrich would have won decisively. Inflation-adjusted prices of the five metals, with the exception of chromium, are now significantly higher than they were in 1980, indicating that they have become scarcer over time.
Do you think this trend will continue? Are we going to run out of new oil fields to drill and new metal deposits to mine, with the result being that prices for these resources will continue to rise?
Put another way, do you think the days of buck-a-gallon gas are gone for good? If not, why? If so, do you think it makes sense to start making our transportation system – and the rest of our economy – less dependent on non-renewable resources?
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About The Fighting Fourth
Hello, and welcome to the Fighting Fourth blog! This forum is intended to be a space in which those of us from the fourth congressional district of South Carolina can discuss the issues facing our hometowns, our nation, and our planet. It’s a project of the Inglis for Congress campaign, but in the end it’s going to run on YOUR ideas. I’m going to be posting pretty regularly to help spark discussion, but my hope is that your comments on those posts will become the real source of excitement. If you have a lot of good things to say, I may end up adding you as a contributor – enabling you to write posts as well as comments on posts. I’ll go into more detail on this later.
A few ground rules: this is intended to be a reasonably civil discussion. At the beginning, at least, I’m going to be moderating the comments, meaning that I’ll have to approve them before they show up on the blog. Any comment that’s offensive, libelous, or just plain mean is not going to get posted. Also, please do your best to make your comments grammatically correct, appropriately punctuated, and free of misspellings.
A few ground rules: this is intended to be a reasonably civil discussion. At the beginning, at least, I’m going to be moderating the comments, meaning that I’ll have to approve them before they show up on the blog. Any comment that’s offensive, libelous, or just plain mean is not going to get posted. Also, please do your best to make your comments grammatically correct, appropriately punctuated, and free of misspellings.
1 comment:
Fundamentally, the wager between Malthusian fool Paul R. Ehrlich and Julian L. Simon remains as a challenge to us as to whom we trust.
If anything, Ehrlich proves that if you live long enough and stay consistent, you can still get academic awards and faculty esteem for a life of being laughably wrong.
The problem with the wager is that Ehrlich was an entomologist specializing in butterflies. Had he been familiar with economics, like Simon, a business administration professor at the University of Maryland, he might have recognized the principle of substitution, in which alternatives are found when commodities become scarce.
Conservation? It always makes good economic sense. Fossil fuel shortages? Alternatives are coming. Metals and commodity shortages? Only temporary. Efficiencies and molecular engineering (nanotechnology) are moving in the gaps.
YouTube shows us that if a man can play a Christmas carol on a broccoli ocarina – anything is possible – just get the overburden of institutions out of the way. How can we launch a YouTube for science and innovation?
Unfortunately, the mockable wrongness of Ehrlich and the Zero Population Growth frenzy he spawned with his 1968 book, The Population Bomb may be a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the ultimate scarcity is going to be people. As a result of declining birth rates, Europe’s productivity in the next two decades faces serious economic challenges and the United States would be in similar shape were it not for – of all things – immigration. What is a word that means “beyond irony”?
In case you missed the end of the world as we know it, here is how Ehrlich, the esteemed winner of the MacArthur Genius Award spun the global future in 1968:
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to 'stretch' the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control."
Simon’s “doomslaying,” was profiled in Wired Magazine (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive
/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html) and wonderfully demonstrated academia’s penchant for clinging to the pre-gloomed, theoretical constructs of its Laputa, rather than empirical facts.
Unfortunately, Simon is dead, and Ehrlich and his disciple Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute continue on with their April Fools’ earnestness on the state of the earth with mankind as its violator. Let’s not forget this season’s radical reverie of the environmental left, The World Without Us. If only we would leave.
No, my money is on Simon, who understands the unquenchable quest of the human mind and the inexhaustible bounty in creation. If a man left alone can make musical instruments out of vegetables, no one has yet imagined the solutions to the many solvable problems we face. As Simon was quoted in Wired:
o The defect of the Malthusian models, superficially plausible but invariably wrong, is that they leave the human mind out of the equation. "These models simply do not comprehend key elements of people - the imaginative and creative."
As for the future, "This is my long-run forecast in brief," says Simon. "The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.
"I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse."
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