

Re-litigating the Simon/Ehrlich Bet - cwan
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/re-litigating_t.html

======
CWuestefeld
_If raging population and economic growth don’t cause important resources to
be depleted, what will?_

He doesn't get it. The point isn't that something magical happens to repeal
scarcity, to give us all the [pick your commodity] that you'd like. Instead,
the scarcity drives up prices (yes, prices do rise in the short run) which
leads those who would have liked to buy the commodity to instead learn to use
a substitute instead.

The reason we're concerned about gasoline now is because we found a better way
to do things than the wood, or whale blubber, that we'd been using previously.
At some point in the future, our descendants will think of fossil fuels as we
think of blubber.

Now, talking outside of my specific knowledge, but just building from what I
understand... I bet that if you went and looked at the price of whale blubber
today, you'd find it significantly higher than back when it was used in lamps.
That would be because nobody is much interested in it anymore, so any
economies of scale in its production have been lost.

~~~
wmf
Is there an end to the process? Is there some "omega resource" for which
cheaper substitutes can never be found?

------
anamax
> If raging population and economic growth don’t cause important resources to
> be depleted

Someone else talked about substitutes so I'll point out that "raging
population and economic growth" doesn't imply that you're anywhere near
depletion. It merely says that you're headed that way.

Consider atmospheric O2. We've got billions more people today than we had 200
years ago, but we're still not anywhere near depletion.

All the numbers and units matter, not just derivatives, and especially not
derivatives without units.

