The belief that resources are scarce and limited is a misunderstanding of the nature of scarcity, which is the key concept behind economics. The absolute quantity of every raw material present in earth is too large for us as human beings to even measure or comprehend, and in no way constitutes a real limit to what we as humans can produce of it. We have barely scratched the surface of the earth in search of the minerals we need, and the more we search, and the deeper we dig, the more resources we find. What constitutes the practical and realistic limit to the quantity of any resource is always the amount of human time that is directed toward producing it, as that is the only real scarce resource (until the creation of Bitcoin). In his masterful book, The Ultimate Resource, the late economist Julian Simon explains how the only limited resource, and in fact the only thing for which the term resource actually applies, is human time. Each human has a limited time on earth, and that is the only scarcity we deal with as individuals. As a society, our only scarcity is in the total amount of time available to members of a society to produce different goods and services. More of any good can always be produced if human time goes toward it. The real cost of a good, then, is always its opportunity cost in terms of goods forgone to produce it.
Figure 20 Global oil consumption, production, proven reserves, and ratio of reserves over annual ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
