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The argument is not that we will suddenly be unable to desalinate water and so forth, it's that the price will rise to put more people into starvation. Claimin

• rdl 14y ago
  It doesn't even need to push us anywhere near starvation to suck. If we have cheap non-renewable resources, they allow us to live a much better quality of life than we would otherwise. If a barrel of oil comes out of the ground with 5 minutes of human effort, and then lets us fly from SFO to NYC, that's one level of awesomeness. If we burn up all the easy oil and the barrel of oil requires an hour of human effort to bring out of the ground, we're worse off. Technology helps (maybe we can drill more efficiently, and maybe we can burn the oil more efficiently, and maybe we can find a good substitute for oil), but If we had a certain economic surplus due to high quality natural resources being available, then having more people means we need to use lower-quality marginal sources. Plus, with time, we use up the high quality natural resources. More productive people should help us improve technology as well, vs. just providing more total labor. On the other hand, if population increases to the point where surplus is reduced, we're less likely to invest in education or other investments which improve the value of human capital, focusing instead on subsistence.