Can the economy grow forever on a finite planet?: Cornucopians
The check
In 1980, Ehrlich chose five metals and bet they would get scarcer. In 1990, every single one was cheaper. He mailed Simon a check for $576.07 and spent the next three decades explaining why he was still right despite being completely wrong. Has a more instructive moment in intellectual history ever been compressed into a personal check?
We are the heirs of Julian Simon. The Club of Rome projected gold exhausted by 1981, mercury by 1985, natural gas by 1994. Gold production in 2023: all-time high. Mercury phased out because we found better alternatives, not because we ran out. Natural gas reserves are larger today than when declared nearly gone. Physical foundations exist. They are also not the fixed quantity the pessimists insist, because resource is not a geological category. It is an economic one. Change the knowledge and the inventory changes. Does the Ogallala matter if Israel turned a desert into an agricultural exporter through desalination and drip irrigation?
The degrowth camp has been predicting collapse for five decades. The timeline keeps slipping. Earth Overshoot Day depends on assumptions uncertain by a factor of two. A metric uncertain by two reported to the day — is that science or marketing?
The green growth camp hedges with conditions — manage the transition, fund retraining. We find the hedging unnecessary. Solar did not win because of the Paris Agreement. Solar won because engineers made it cheaper than coal. When has the market not eventually solved a scarcity problem if you gave it enough time and enough freedom to innovate?
The decouplers have identified real technologies and then insist they need government master plans. Did fracking need a circular economy directive? Did the internet emerge from a regulatory framework?
Where we concede ground: The winning streak was partly ecological borrowing. The Green Revolution fed billions by depleting aquifers millennia old.
What would change our mind: A critical resource entering sustained global scarcity for a full decade despite active market incentives to find substitutes.
Read the full synthesis: Can the economy grow forever on a finite planet?