> When the original doomsayers' manual Limits to Growth was
> published, Sussex
> University scientist William Page pointed out the error of assuming
> that
> reserves were a known, or fixed quantity. With drilling going no
> further
> than six of the 25-40 miles of the earth's crust, reserves have
> hardly been
> touched yet. Page's point is not that the resources of the Earth are
> infinite. Only that the Limits to Growth computer model massively
> understated them. He predicted then that, in principle, resources were
> sufficient for ".perhaps tens of thousands of years". As Page says
> ".the
> most pressing limits to growth are not geological: Mother Nature
> has put
> ample on the planet". Rather ".what limits there may be come from
> man's
> economic and technological ability to exploit these resources".
> (HSO Cole et
> al, Thinking About the Future, Sussex University Press, 1973, p38)
Keynes long ago made this point in the context of a psycho- biographical essay on Jevons, one of the originators of "Bedlamite economics." From similar mistaken assumptions, Jevons, a "remorseless logician," ended up in the "Bedlam" of the conclusion that growth would soon be brought to an end by finite supplies of coal. He reached a similar conclusion about future supplies of paper and in anticipation accumulated a large hoard of writing and packing paper. Keynes interprets this as an expression of psychopathology anchored in a "hoarding instinct," the same instinct from which the psychopathological "propensity to hoard" underpinning his "liquidity preference" theory of interest is derived.
"there is not much in Jevons's scare which can survive cool criticism. His conclusions were influenced, I suspect, by a psychological trait, unusually strong in him which many other people share, a certain hoarding instinct, a readiness to be alarmed and excited by the idea of the exhaustion of resources. Mr H.S. Jevons has communicated to me an amusing illustration of this. Jevons held similar ideas as to the approaching scarcity of paper as a result of the vastness of the demand in relation to the supplies of suitable material (and here again he omitted to make adequate allowance for the progress of technical methods). Moreover, he acted on his fears and laid in such large stores not only of writing-paper, but also of thin brown packing paper, that even to-day, more than fifty years after his death, his children have not used up the stock he left behind him of the latter; though his purchases seem to have been more in the nature of a speculation than for his personal use, since his own notes were mostly written on the backs of old envelopes and odd scraps of paper, of which the proper place was the waste-paper basket." (Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 117)
Ted