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> The issue is does increasing economic output, require increasing energy use? The answer is no. The article addresses that by arguing that it would imply ener

> The issue is does increasing economic output, require increasing energy use? The answer is no. The article addresses that by arguing that it would imply energy became arbitrarily cheap, while being scarce and finite. That means someone could buy the whole supply and wipe out their competitors. That contradicts it being arbitrarily cheap, so energy would be a limiting factor.

bryanlarsen 5y ago
Which is a silly argument. There a lots of essential raw materials that have a market size of a few billion or less per year. Bezos could theoretically buy the entire years supply and cripple the economy. For example, let's choose something expensive sounding -- platinum. 170 tons per year of production, at $30 million per ton. $5B will let you corner the market for the year. Yet it doesn't happen, for a wide variety of reasons.
- jbay808 5y ago
  For the analogy to work with energy and still be true to the physicist's argument, we would also have to imagine that all exchange of goods and services requires new platinum -- and that there's a hard physical limit on the platinum mining rate. Perhaps a world where platinum jewelry is all that is bought and sold. Jewelers improve in skill and the jewelrt becomes ever more intricate and elaborate, such that its value grows ever higher than the raw platinum it's made from. In such a world, there might be no limit on the jeweler's craft, but could the price of platinum really become arbitrarily small? As time goes on, first the world's greatest jeweler could afford the whole supply, but then even a second rate jeweler, and then eventually anybody could perhaps afford to buy all the raw platinum.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    A: Platinum is an example, there are hundreds of other such resources. B: Platinum is much easier to corner than energy would be, since platinum mining is limited to a very few number of active minutes. Energy production is quite distributed.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

Which is a silly argument. There a lots of essential raw materials that have a market size of a few billion or less per year. Bezos could theoretically buy the entire years supply and cripple the economy. For example, let's choose something expensive sounding -- platinum. 170 tons per year of production, at $30 million per ton. $5B will let you corner the market for the year. Yet it doesn't happen, for a wide variety of reasons.

jbay808 5y ago
For the analogy to work with energy and still be true to the physicist's argument, we would also have to imagine that all exchange of goods and services requires new platinum -- and that there's a hard physical limit on the platinum mining rate. Perhaps a world where platinum jewelry is all that is bought and sold. Jewelers improve in skill and the jewelrt becomes ever more intricate and elaborate, such that its value grows ever higher than the raw platinum it's made from. In such a world, there might be no limit on the jeweler's craft, but could the price of platinum really become arbitrarily small? As time goes on, first the world's greatest jeweler could afford the whole supply, but then even a second rate jeweler, and then eventually anybody could perhaps afford to buy all the raw platinum.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  A: Platinum is an example, there are hundreds of other such resources. B: Platinum is much easier to corner than energy would be, since platinum mining is limited to a very few number of active minutes. Energy production is quite distributed.