Jay Hanson wrote,
>Robert L. Hickerson wrote an interesting piece about M. King Hubbert.
Thanks to Jay for bringing up Robert Hickerson's essay on King Hubbert. In
connection with my own cause celebre, the reduction of work time, I would be
remiss if I failed to point out Hickerson's penultimate paragraph, before
his personal conclusions and recommendations:
"Hubbert goes on to state that following a transition, the work required of
each individual, need be no longer than about 4 hours per day, 164 days per
year, from the ages of 25 to 45. Income will continue until death.
'Insecurity of old age is abolished and both saving and insurance become
unnecessary and impossible.'"
It's also worth noting that Hubbert's analysis comes from his 1936 article
"Man Hours -- A Declining Quantity". For those who are familiar with
Hubbert's prescient estimates of oil extraction peaks -- obviously a major
influence on Jay -- it's interesting to find a very similar analysis applied
in the 1936 article on hours as work.
In 1948, Hubbert made his first public prediction that U.S. domestic oil
production would peak in the late 1960s/early 1970s. But, as quoted by
Robert Clark in 1983 interview, "I first worked this out in the middle 1930s
but the first time I really wrote it down was for the AAAS convention in 1948."
That "middle 1930s" sounds remarkably close to the 1936 publication date of
the Man Hours article. I suspect that what Hubbert did was apply the same
concept to two facets of the economy -- hours of work and energy supply. I
don't want to take anything away from Hubbert's scientific achievements, but
it is my contention that Hubbert essentially confirmed ancient traditional
wisdom about the perniciousness of compound interest.
Hubbert's arc of petroleum depletion is, after all, constructed to
illustrate the interaction of two principles: the boundless exponential
growth of compound interest and the finite quantity of extractable resources.
But, as Hickerson notes in one of his personal conclusions: "Increasingly
desperate means will be used by those who think we can continue to have
business as usual."
An odd thought occurred to me about the 1970 peak of U.S. domestic
production. The oil crisis didn't register on the political map and prices
of oil didn't go up relatively until the OPEC embargo in October 1973, a
full three years after the peak. Meanwhile what emerged as a major political
scandal was a "third rate burglary" at the Watergate. Once again, as we
approach an even more auspicious global peak, the energy crisis is not on
the political map. This time, the headline issue is a blow job. Talk about
Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
I hear they just named the CIA headquarters after George Bush.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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