X-Message-Number: 22007 Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 17:51:31 -0700 From: James Swayze <> Subject: Tricky Statistics References: <> > > > >Message #21982 >From: "michaelprice" <> >References: <> >Subject: Malthus vs Simon >Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 06:05:32 +0100 > >Ron Havelock writes: > > > >>>Once we've squandered what's left of the planet's fossil >>>thermodynamic capital, the human race faces a massive >>>die-off and a PERMANENT dark age, no matter how >>>much technological knowledge we might have acquired by >>>then >>> >>> <snippage> > Simon poses the question, how can we objectively >measure raw-material scarcity? His answer is to examine the >wage-inflation-adjusted price of raw-materials. (Not relative to >retail-price inflation, which only measures *relative* >scarcity/availablity.) Wage inflation adjusted prices measure how long an >average worker must work to buy a unit some commodity, including >raw-materials. The wage-adjusted prices of most (perhaps all) raw-materials >(oil, electricity, coal, aluminium, iron etc) are presented and they all >show an exponential decline with time, averaged over decades. By this >objective measure, then, we arrive at the astounding conclusion that >raw-materials are growing less scarce with time, as new technologies evolve >to improve extraction and recycling techniques, along with the development >of alternatives (e.g. for oil read solar and thermonuclear energy). > > I don't wish to take a stance either way here. I can't, I haven't read the books in question. However, at first glance at this statement I do have some questions. How subjective were these figures looked at? I mean by this, how much minute detail was put into exactly what you mention about technology, etc. and measurements of the effect thereof on wwage prices to arrive at an alleged objective calculation? Take coal for instance. It once took one hundred times more men at leat to mine it. It cost a great deal in man hours. However, due to inflation those hours were cheaper but exactly how cheaper is complicated. A lot of things affect the price of wages. Were the effects of politics, strikes, unionization, and yes indeed replacing men with machines all intricately calculated to arrive at "wage-adjusted prices"? If not then it seems a bit to simplistic of Simon to make such a statement. In fact the cost of wages has nothing whatsoever to do with a measurement of the surmised quantity of an unknown quantity of any given resource. How could it? We cannot know exactly how much oil the earth has until we've found every drop. What it cost to mine it has no relation to, no vector on the quantity of it. For example if a hypothetical magical being came to earth and gave us for free magic oil mining machines that needed no cost to run whatsoever, does this mean with the cost nearly zero that we have almost infinite supply? By the above it would also seem that with time the supply increases also. Not too logical to me. Sorry to jump in but my logic circuits lit up when I read the way these statistics were parsed. James -- Cryonics Institute of Michigan Member! The Immortalist Society Member! The Society for Venturism Member! MY WEBSITE: http://www.geocities.com/~davidpascal/swayze/ Signature Memetic Virus--The worst enemy of those who now or will need medical care is the politician and proselytizing religious fanatic who proscribes what doctors are allowed to prescribe and research, with the consent of their patients. Those who understand this are strongly encouraged to modify this to fit their personality, and add this to their signature file, and organize to recover our freedom from Big Brother. For those who wait until they are sick, it will be too late. Those who suffer from diseases which might have been cured by fetal tissue research or schedule 1 drugs banned by Big Brother, have the right to hold accountable those who sat on their hands or worse, deferred their responsibility for personal and humanity's survival to useless gods and pontificating religious quacks, while they remained ill and dying. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22007