The Ultimate Resource (book)

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The Ultimate Resource is a 1981 book written by Julian Lincoln Simon challenging the notion that humanity was running out of natural resources. It was revised in 1996 as The Ultimate Resource 2. Since this revised version repeats and expands on the old version, this article focuses on the 1996 book.

[edit] Overview

The overarching thesis on why there is no resource crisis is that as a particular resource becomes more scarce, its price rises; this rise of price creates an incentive for people to discover more of the resource, ration it and, eventually, develop substitutes. The “ultimate resource” is not any particular physical object but the capacity for humans to invent and adapt.

[edit] Scarcity

The work opens with an explanation of scarcity, noting its relation to price; high prices denote relative scarcity and low prices indicate abundance. Simon usually measures prices in wage agjusted terms, since this is a measure of how much labor is required to purchase a fixed amount of a particular resource. Since prices for most raw materials (e.g. copper) have fallen between 1800 and 1990 (adjusting for wages and adjusting for inflation), Simon argues that this indicates that those materials have become less scarce.

Simon contends that people adapt to effectively create more resources, such as copper, as they start becoming scarcer

[edit] Forecasting

Simon makes a distinction between "engineering” and “economic” forecasting. The former consists of estimating the amount of known physical amount of resources, extrapolates the rate of use from current use and subtracts one from the other. Simon argues that these simple analyses are often wrong. While focusing only on proven resources is helpful in a business context, it is not appropriate for economy-wide forecasting; there exists undiscovered sources, sources not yet economically feasible to extract, sources not yet technologically feasible to extract, and unconceived resources that could prove useful but are not yet worth trying to discover.

To counter the problems of the former method, Simon proposes an economist’s method. It proceeds in three steps in order to capture, in part, the unknowns the engineering method leaves out (p 27):

[edit] Infinite Resources

Perhaps the most controversial claim in the book is that natural resources are infinite. Simon argues not that there is an infinite physical amount of, say, copper, but for human purposes that amount should be treated as infinite because it is not bounded or limited in any economic sense, because:

• known reserves are of uncertain amounts
• new reserves may become available, either through discovery or via the development of new extraction techniques
• recycling
• more efficient utilization of existing reserves (e.g. "It takes much less copper now to pass a given message than a hundred years ago." (The Ultimate Resource 2, 1996, footnote, page 62).")
• development of economic equivalents, e.g. optic fibre in the case of copper for telecommunications

The ever-decreasing prices (and thus decreasing scarcity) despite population growth suggest an enduring trend that will not cease in the foreseeable future.

[edit] Evidence

A plurality of the book consists of chapters showcasing the economics of one resource or another and proposing why this resource is, of human purposes, infinite.

[edit] Historical Precedent

Simon argues that for thousands of years, people have always worried about the end of civilization brought on by a crisis of resources. Simon lists several past unfounded environmental fears in order to back his claim that modern fears are nothing new and will also be disproven.

Some of the “crises” he notes are a shortage of tin in the 1200s BCE; disappearing forests in Greece in 550 BCE and in England in the 1500s to 1700s CE; food in 1798; coal in Great Britain in the 1800s; oil since the 1850s; and various metals since the 1970s.

[edit] Population

A large section of the book is dedicated to showing how population growth ultimately creates more resources. The basic argument echoes the overarching thesis: as resources become more scarce, the price rises, creating an incentive to adapt. The more people a society has to invent and innovate, ceteris paribus, the easier the society will raise its living standards and lower resource scarcity. People, on average, add to a civilization more than they take away.

[edit] See Also

• Julian Lincoln Simon
• Thomas Malthus
• Paul Ehrlich

[edit] Sources

• Simon, Julian. The Ultimate Resource 2. (1996).

[edit] External Links

• Full text of The Ultimate Resource 2