Tag Archives: resource depletion
Limits to Growth?
Current economics assumes a world of unlimited resources, unlimited wealth. No matter how rapidly a resource is used, either (i) “They” will always find more, or (ii) substitute resources will always be found to serve to any required extent as well or better in place of the depleted resource. … Read more
Digression: “So Long As We Profit, Costs Elsewhere Aren’t Our Problem”?
A fault of flat earth economics as practiced in free enterprise economies is that it chops a nation’s economy into sections that are too often treated as being self-contained and independent of other sections. This is not a useful or realistic view. … Read more
Value Inflation – the Trigger, not the Bullet
The direct addition of value inflation to the rate of price increases is quite small. The larger effect arises from secondary influences, in whose shaping human psychology plays an important part. These influences are triggered by the small value inflation component and its corollary, a slowing of the rate of net throughput increase relative to gross throughput increase. … Read more
Budget Balancing Methods – Cost or Gain?
Measures to reduce expenditure and increase revenue raising by governments will often be seen in current economic terms as “costs” to the nation. But if seen in the light of the ideas put forward in the post about “Costs – What Really Costs Us and What Doesn’t?” they are economic gains. … Read more
Digression – Resource Consumption, Jobs, and Hands Off
Is increasing throughput always bad?
Not necessarily. Many times in these postings, the reduction of throughput is stated or implied to be a benefit. But this only applies to present-day conditions when so many resources are being depleted because they are throughput faster than they can be renewed. … Read more
Discussion of Costs Resumed
Partial Accounting: Another spurious “cost” often used as a basis for policy appears as a result of partial accounting. An urban public transport service might be reduced or eliminated on the grounds that the costs of the service are nowhere near covered by passenger fares, and that costs can be reduced and the nation or city thereby enriched by cutting the service. … Read more
Ratio Distortion and Consumption
Before and during the Great Depression there was under-consumption due to chronic under-payment of workers – fewer goods and services were being consumed than available workers and plant could structure. But what of the stagflationary situation, when chronic overpayment of workers was the distortion affecting more perfluent economies? … Read more
Digression – Thrift versus Spendthrift
Merely transferring money into the wages channel, increasing the spending power of consumers without forcing them to borrow, is of course not enough; the spending power must be translated into effective demand, with increased spending and consumption actually taking place – the more the better. … Read more
Non-renewable Resources – Leave Them in the Ground?
The principle of consuming resources at a rate no faster than their rate of renewal appears to be untenable in the case of resources whose renewal rate is almost zero, as is true of fossil fuels, gas, oil, and coal, also fissile uranium and thorium. … Read more
Evolution Not Revolution
Achieving a sustainable world economy would be nothing less than a great step in human evolution, comparable with the mastery of fire or the development of settled agriculture as opposed to hunting and gathering. It concerns the whole world and needs to be tackled on a world, not just a national, basis. … Read more