Pricing drives Progress

Modest piece in Sunday NYTimes on resource "constraints"

It posits concerns that the world will run out of resources
( have we heard this one before? )

"Oil, copper and even people will someday be noticeably scarcer than they are today, and technology may not always provide a way out.

In the last few years, rapid growth in China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies has coincided, not surprisingly, with an upward trend in the prices of commodities like oil. In the short term, there's not enough time for suppliers to cope with ballooning demand; that's part of why prices rise."

Then answers with

"But market dynamics in the long term are likely to be more significant."


In my opinion, there is plenty of land, but there is the old adage, of "location location location"
Note that in the US, the middle of the country, esp. the Great Plains are depopulating, while the coastal populations are growing.
More :

"The supply of crude oil will benefit from technological improvements, Professor Jorgenson predicted. "People figure out clever ways to explore for oil, to produce it and transport it," he said. "All of that goes in the other direction."

There is also the chance that a burst of innovation will lay low the entire market. Imagine, for instance, what would happen if scientists finally developed a portable nuclear fusion reactor — the kind that could power a house or a car. But it's tough to say when, or if, that will happen. "The whole fusion program — people have being saying for the last 40 years that it's 50 years out," said John L. Staub, an industry economist at the Energy Department's energy information administration. "Well, it's still 50 years out."

And even ignoring technological changes, Mr. Montepeque said, it's a dangerous game to make dire long-term forecasts about the supply of commodities like crude oil — or any forecasts at all, for that matter.

"Being sensible people, we can say that the amount of oil, coal, shale, gas is finite," he said. "Do we know how much there is down there? The plain answer is, nobody has any idea."

There are a couple of areas, however, where scarcity is more predictable. "The long-run scarcities are for human labor and land," said Peter H. Lindert, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. He said their value, in terms of goods and services, would continue to rise forever.