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

-- 
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