5 ms·

In an econ book I read once, there was a wonderful analogy: Imagine you are given a room in your house that was filled waste high with pistachios - you could go

In an econ book I read once, there was a wonderful analogy: Imagine you are given a room in your house that was filled waste high with pistachios - you could go in and eat as many as you wanted, but the shells will always have to be left behind. They start out easy and plentiful to grab, and you could easily do some math about how long this room of pistachios will last you. So on paper you are sure to run out. But in practice, you'll just spend longer going into the room every time to get what you want, and gradually stop going altogether - actually running out of nuts is pretty much impossible. You will almost never naturally run out of stuff. Low prices make them leave it in the ground - high prices makes people find substitutes. We're just in a weird place were China might be dumping money to artificially keep some resource prices low and still extracting tons of it.

titzer 4y ago
Tell that to the whales. Prior to 1700 there were estimated over 350,000 blue whales in the world's oceans. Now, only an estimated 25,000 remain. Human-caused complete extinction is very common, particularly for megafauna. E.g. giant sloths in North America and most large animals in Australia went extinct within centuries or millenia of human settlement.
- legitster 4y ago
  Population management is a bit different. And while, yes whales are a tragedy, the paper in question is trying to make a point that running out of fixed resources will lead to economic collapse. Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. Also, whales in particular are an interesting example, because the vast majority of them were slaughtered completely unnecessarily by the Soviet Union just to fulfill arbitrary production quotas: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
  - pjmorris 4y ago
    > Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. I was reading GP's comment as not so much about whales as about the kind of thing that could happen to any flora or fauna, e.g. bees. Sooner or later we're going to deplete something that has unintended ecological and economic consequences.
    - legitster 4y ago
      Oh sure. But this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon: mammoths, the rainforests of Scotland, silphium. But as a response to the paper, I just think it's a hard argument to make that there are specific material limits to economic growth.
      - sbf501 4y ago
        It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators). We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a global scale, not just referring to the poor in one country in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) map of population death toll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/File:Ireland_population_change_1841_1851.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/...
        scottLobster 4y ago
        I'm not sure the potato famine is the best example, as a large part of the "famine" was due to British mismanagement/cruelty. The Brits kept exporting food from Ireland in spite of the famine, leaving the Irish to starve. Had they banned exports, like India is doing now for wheat, it likely would have been a historical footnote.
        daniel-cussen 4y ago
        They also insisted nobody gift food to the Irish in excess of what the queen of England was giving them. Censored I think...Ottoman Empire's gifts this way. They had to maroon ships full of grain by accident, and tons of people sent food, like even Kenyans and Native Americans. Ireland still hasn't repopulated. Still half its 19th century peak population roughly.
  - soperj 4y ago
    USA took in nearly 200,000 tons of whales in 1858 alone, nearly all of it just to produce oil from the blubber, and the rest of the carcass was discarded. I'd say that was completely unnecessary as well.
Paedor 4y ago
It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5 pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough.
- legitster 4y ago
  > you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough That's the whole point of the analogy. Even if you still need pistachios, most rational people will start looking elsewhere. A good example of this is California's water shortage. It may seem like collapse is inevitable, but Californians just voted against another desalination plant. Alternatives exist everywhere but the policy failure is in preventing people from exploring them.
  - boringg 4y ago
    De-sal super expensive and has issues - isn't a silver bullet as proponents like to make it out to be.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      Is it more expensive than running out of water though?
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        If the cost of running out of water is shutting down a few acres of almond farms, probably.
      - pyuser583 4y ago
        It’s more expensive than other alternatives to running out of water. For example, mining fresh water from below the ocean floor.
  - lazide 4y ago
    The issue is that water is cheap and nearly free when you have enough, and nearly impossible to get when you don’t. Desalination plants need to be run regularly or everything plugs up/corrodes. They’re also capital intensive and not cheap to operate (as the process itself is expensive per gallon), so expensive to buy and not use, AND not cheap to buy and use. But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can use (literally!), and the remaining 10% of the time, it still isn’t actually out of water in most places, as the water sources are regional or local, and most local or regional water sources are still fine. So you’d be spending a massive amount of money to hedge for an edge case that generally never happens in a way the hedge would economically solve. Which is why they generally don’t actually get built, or if they do, they get built and then decommissioned. At least around here. Other, drier climates (middle east) are different of course. We’ll get there eventually I’m sure.
imtringued 4y ago
Plenty of island communities actually ran out of resources, especially firewood.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Rare earth are not rare Euros just don't want the environmental problems and cancer cases. Even Serbia went full nimby on mining them lol.

titzer 4y ago

Tell that to the whales. Prior to 1700 there were estimated over 350,000 blue whales in the world's oceans. Now, only an estimated 25,000 remain. Human-caused complete extinction is very common, particularly for megafauna. E.g. giant sloths in North America and most large animals in Australia went extinct within centuries or millenia of human settlement.

legitster 4y ago
Population management is a bit different. And while, yes whales are a tragedy, the paper in question is trying to make a point that running out of fixed resources will lead to economic collapse. Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. Also, whales in particular are an interesting example, because the vast majority of them were slaughtered completely unnecessarily by the Soviet Union just to fulfill arbitrary production quotas: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
- pjmorris 4y ago
  > Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. I was reading GP's comment as not so much about whales as about the kind of thing that could happen to any flora or fauna, e.g. bees. Sooner or later we're going to deplete something that has unintended ecological and economic consequences.
  - legitster 4y ago
    Oh sure. But this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon: mammoths, the rainforests of Scotland, silphium. But as a response to the paper, I just think it's a hard argument to make that there are specific material limits to economic growth.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators). We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a global scale, not just referring to the poor in one country in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) map of population death toll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/File:Ireland_population_change_1841_1851.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/...
      - scottLobster 4y ago
        I'm not sure the potato famine is the best example, as a large part of the "famine" was due to British mismanagement/cruelty. The Brits kept exporting food from Ireland in spite of the famine, leaving the Irish to starve. Had they banned exports, like India is doing now for wheat, it likely would have been a historical footnote.
        daniel-cussen 4y ago
        They also insisted nobody gift food to the Irish in excess of what the queen of England was giving them. Censored I think...Ottoman Empire's gifts this way. They had to maroon ships full of grain by accident, and tons of people sent food, like even Kenyans and Native Americans. Ireland still hasn't repopulated. Still half its 19th century peak population roughly.
- soperj 4y ago
  USA took in nearly 200,000 tons of whales in 1858 alone, nearly all of it just to produce oil from the blubber, and the rest of the carcass was discarded. I'd say that was completely unnecessary as well.

Paedor 4y ago

It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5 pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough.

legitster 4y ago
> you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough That's the whole point of the analogy. Even if you still need pistachios, most rational people will start looking elsewhere. A good example of this is California's water shortage. It may seem like collapse is inevitable, but Californians just voted against another desalination plant. Alternatives exist everywhere but the policy failure is in preventing people from exploring them.
- boringg 4y ago
  De-sal super expensive and has issues - isn't a silver bullet as proponents like to make it out to be.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Is it more expensive than running out of water though?
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      If the cost of running out of water is shutting down a few acres of almond farms, probably.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      It’s more expensive than other alternatives to running out of water. For example, mining fresh water from below the ocean floor.
- lazide 4y ago
  The issue is that water is cheap and nearly free when you have enough, and nearly impossible to get when you don’t. Desalination plants need to be run regularly or everything plugs up/corrodes. They’re also capital intensive and not cheap to operate (as the process itself is expensive per gallon), so expensive to buy and not use, AND not cheap to buy and use. But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can use (literally!), and the remaining 10% of the time, it still isn’t actually out of water in most places, as the water sources are regional or local, and most local or regional water sources are still fine. So you’d be spending a massive amount of money to hedge for an edge case that generally never happens in a way the hedge would economically solve. Which is why they generally don’t actually get built, or if they do, they get built and then decommissioned. At least around here. Other, drier climates (middle east) are different of course. We’ll get there eventually I’m sure.

imtringued 4y ago

Plenty of island communities actually ran out of resources, especially firewood.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Rare earth are not rare Euros just don't want the environmental problems and cancer cases. Even Serbia went full nimby on mining them lol.