[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > All the doomsayers of the 70s predicted > prices for copper, iron ore, etc. would go through the roof. The main culprit here is the Club of Rome, which is famous for publishing "Limits to Growth" and "Mankind At The Turning Point". Hotelling's Rule (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_rule) would have been a clue to anyone who looked at it. For those who are not used to the arcane language of professional economics, let me give a simple explanation.
If you own a non-renewable resource, such as a copper mine, you can dig the copper now, take the money, and invest it; or you can leave the copper in the ground until next year, and take advantage of a potential price increase to get for more for it when you dig it out. The equilibrium solution in a simple model is that the price of the resource (i.e. copper) should increase at a rate equal to the interest rate. As to why this happens, the short answer is that if it did not, people would change their behavior, and by so doing, they would make it come true after all. I can give a longer explanation, but most normal people seem to display eyes glazing over whenever an economist explains anything. Now, this result holds for a simple model, and the world is nothing like a simple model, but it illustrates some important principals nonetheless. As supplies decrease, we should expect prices to increase, and when prices increase behavior changes in response. For example, in the 1970s we had several oil price shocks that pushed prices what were then all-time highs. In the short-term, people got gouged, but in the longer term they changed their behavior, and as a result demand fell and prices by the late 1980s were near historical lows (at least recent history; I don't know what 19th c. prices were like.) The behavior chage can take a variety of forms, such as increased use of substitutes, conservation, increased search for new supplies, etc. So Dan is entirely correct to be skeptical about a claim that resource limitations are going to be a near-term problem. As he says, local disturbances would result (for some reason Detroit has never quite understood that oil prices might ever go up, so they are always caught out every time it happens), but it is not a global catastrophe in any reasonable sense of the term. Where I disagree with Dan is his implication that since one class of potential problems didn't materialize, no problems will ever materialize. Over-population is not the same sort of thing as resource usage (though it can contribute to it). I would not call it unprecedented, since it has happened locally, as has climate change. (Ever notice that the bread-basket of the Roman Empire is now a desert?), but the scale on which it is happening is truly new. I was just listening to Science Friday the other day, talking about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Apparently, lakes were forming on the surface, and they were starting to investigate when the lakes started disappearing. And by disappearing, I mean in minutes. They told of one lake that was kilometers wide that disappeared in 90 minutes. They computed the rate of flow as 3x that of Niagara Falls. And now they only observe from a safe distance. Maybe it will all turn out to be just a minor localized disturbance, but a whole lot of climatologists seem to think it is pretty serious, so I am inclined to go that way. And there is always the Fermi paradox to keep in mind. Back in the 1960s some of us wondered if the reason there were no other advanced civilizations out there is that they blew themselves up with nuclear weapons or something like that. Now there is an alternative possibility, they they could not escape the Malthusian trap and destroyed themselves and their environment. Regards, -- Kevin B. O'Brien TANSTAAFL [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linux User #333216 "In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is bad." -- Nietzsche _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
