Bill Menke's BLOG Page: Cornucopians and Convervation
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Cornucopia of Resources
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Simon (1980) has argued that the the issue of human beings running
out of some resource, like petroleum, wood or copper, is irrelevant,
because what counts is the service that the resource renders to society,
not the resource itself. Scarcity
according to Simon, leads to innovation and the substitution of resources, not to deprivation.
A increase in demand driven by a burgeoning of human population is
offset by an increase in the number of innovative minds.
For example, the information distribution service
that copper, in the form of telephone wires, provides has mostly been
supplanted by glass, in the form of optical fibers, and by the electromagnetic
waves used by cell phones and communication satellites.
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Cornucopian optimism is usually espoused by people with pro-buisness,
pro-trade and anti-regulatory political leanings, people who often also
oppose conservation. Why bother to conserve, when we will always
find a substitute for the resources we use up?
But actually, many Conservationists are less concerned with the
depletion of the resource itself than with the impact that obtaining
and using it has on the world. Thus, for instance, Conservationist
opposition to oil extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
(ANWR) is more about the impact on the areas wildlife and scenic beauty,
than on the actual loss of underground oil reservoirs. And the
best way to minimize that impact is simply set the region aside and
not exploit any resouces that it contains. This is primarily an aesthetic
and moral argument, not one that involves optimum economic choices.
This type of Conservation, forgoing resource explotation
in regions, perhaps even very large regions, is perfectly compatible
with Cornucopianism. In fact, Cornucopian theory indicates that no economic harm
will come from us choosing not to exploit a region. Sure, there may be
short-term scarcity, but that scarcity will drive innovation and
a substitute will soon be found. And, as in the
case of optical fibers replacing coperr wires, the substitute may well be an improvement over the
original. There is no
economic harm in having the substitute be developed a few years early, owing to
a conscious choice not to exploit the last reserves of the commodity.
I find this point of view more attractive than the standard Malthusian
scenario, where the running out of a vital commodity is assumed to cause
catastrophic suffering. How many people would really forego exploiting any remaining
reserve, if they were convinced that in doing so they were hastening the
date of their demise?
*Simon, J.L., Resources, population, environment: an oversupply of
bad news, Science 208, 1431-1437, 1980.