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Economic Growth and the Real Accretion of Resources

10 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by Nuetzel in Growth, Scarcity

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Angus Maddison, Carbon Concentrations, Carbon Dial, Common Resources, Don Boudreaux, External Costs, Fusion Energy, Geothermal Energy, global warming, Grabby Civilization, Greening, Growth, Human capital, Human Ingenuity, Julian Simon, Known Reserves, Markets, Modular Reactors, Paleoclimate Data, Price Signals, Public Finance, Renewables, Resource Accretion, Risk Mitigation, S-Curve, Scarcity, Sea Levels, Space Mining, Urban Heat Islands

A few weeks ago I argued that raising living standards and eliminating poverty are human imperatives, and therefore growth is an imperative. Growth is a natural process for a free and creative people, and the alternative to growth is not zero growth. The coercion necessary to “achieve” a static economic environment would invariably lead to decline. It would be impossible to maintain average living standards while attempting a coerced leveling of those standards.

People have a notion, however, that it’s impossible to sustain growth due to the planet’s finite base of resources. If that is the case, we have available a mechanism to warn us as the time of hard limits approaches, which I’ll discuss below. So far, that signal hasn’t been activated. Moreover, the claim that growth is unsustainable can be challenged on several levels, which I’ll also address.

Effective Resources

First, a word about what I mean by the “accretion of resources”. The phrase refers to growth in the total effectiveness or productive potential of known resources given the rate of discovery and improvements in extraction and production technologies. Of course, if these discoveries and efficiencies are exceeded by current use, then there is no accretion, but depletion.

So let’s say we have a particular known stock of a resource we can readily draw on, so many pounds of resource X. In addition, we might know of the existence of another equally large quantity that can’t be readily drawn upon. Those are additional known (or proved) but undeveloped reserves. They might be difficult to exploit except at high cost, but we know they exist. We’d want to get on with the business of developing those reserves for extraction if they were needed any time soon, and we might want to begin prospecting for new reserves as well. As we’ve learned over the years. discoveries of previously unknown reserves of resources can be quite large. Prospectors are willing to bet that more resources exist, and they’ll undertake the risks of exploration if the potential rewards are adequate.

All of those concepts are straightforward. However, suppose we discover ways in which resource X can be used more efficiently, making things stronger or run longer or harder with less X. If we double the efficiency with which X is used, we have doubled the effective known reserves of X and, at least theoretically, unknown reserves as well. We’d have witnessed a doubling in the years that resource X can last. This is a form of resource accretion. Improvements in extraction or purification methods are also examples. Technological leaps like this, not to mention untold small increments in the efficiency of practices, have made economic growth possible in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Our effective resources seem to keep expanding. Accretion has occurred even with respect to resources like land as the world urbanized and the efficiency of farming advanced many-fold.

Growth In Real Time

Perceptions of growth are sometimes shaped by graphic depictions that some parties find alarming, so it might be helpful to take a quick look at some growth curves. First is an oldie-but-goodie chart showing GDP per capita taken from “Statistics on World Population, GDP, and Per Capital GDP, 1- 2008 AD” by Angus Maddison of the IMF:

This shows the explosion in the value of production that occurred during and after the industrial revolution, in contrast to very slow progress before that. The point I want to make here is how dramatic growth can look on a broad but visually compressed time scale. OMG! Look what we’ve done! How can we go on like this??? Often, the crux of the limits to growth argument is that such growth seems impossible assuming that we face fixed resource limits.

In fact, we experience growth in a very “local” way with respect to the passage of time. The two charts below illustrate a difference in perspectives using a hypothetically constant annual growth rate of 2.5%. The first chart shows 200 periods of growth, while the second expands only the last 20 periods of that time frame.

There is a great difference in the way the two vertical axes are scaled, which is important, but the second chart conveys that a respectable growth rate doesn’t really feel extreme when you’re in the middle of it, or, that is, in real time. It can look very extreme at the end of a long interval, depending on how severely the time axis is compressed. That’s not to discount the reality of much larger levels of activity (the vertical axes) and demands for resources as time goes on. However, those levels, and growth from those levels, is not at all alarming if our ability to achieve them has kept pace. So how can we know when we’re approaching a point at which resource limits will make it impossible to achieve those levels of activity? Market prices are the key signals, and they are the key to resource accretion.

Market Signals Light the Way

The market price is the best gauge of the scarcity of a resource. When resources become especially scarce, higher prices tell us so. That leads to conservation, which obviously extends the availability of those resources. Prices also function as an incentive for sellers to exploit new or harder-to-reach stores of a resource. That kind of resource accretion is one of the lessens the oil market has taught us again and again: oil exploration and known reserves tend to expand as the price rises, such that the prospect of oil depletion moves out to ever more distant horizons. There are certain minerals, elements, or isotopes (tritium?) that seem to be quite rare on Earth, but our ability to find them or extract them often improves with time. Space mining, which would vastly reduce the scarcity of resources like platinum, iron, nickel, cobalt, and many others, may become a reality in the near future. Interestingly, much of that activity could be in private hands. Space mining would lead to resource accretion on a whole new scale, and if we aspire to be a “grabby” civilization, it is a logical next step. So let’s go grab an asteroid!

When a price spikes due to greater scarcity, opportunities for substitution, exploration, and new efficiencies arise because the higher price justifies the cost of exploiting them. In addition to more difficult or costly extraction, a higher price encourages the use of close and even novel substitutes that may involve new technologies. In turn, that substitution reduces the relative scarcity of the original resource in question. And finally, back to conservation, users respond to price increases by finding their own innovative efficiencies in how a resource is utilized. The price response to scarcity is a channel through which much technological progress is encouraged.

While our earth-bound resources or even our star-system’s resources are finite, their effective quantity is highly flexible. Their potential at any time depends on our stage of discovery and the state of technology. Human ingenuity is a marvel at stretching the effective quantity of resources, and the greatest gains always occur when market forces are unleashed.

Thus, we see that prices, markets, and capitalism itself enable rational and sustainable responses to scarcity. Yet too often we hear claims that capitalism must be destroyed in order to save humanity. In fact, capitalism itself is the one system of social organization capable of achieving resource accretion, sustained growth, and lifting mankind from poverty. In fact, growth might well be an insurmountable problem without the dynamic energies of capitalism. Government planners are incapable of gathering and processing the vast information that markets process each and every day. Planners must substitute their own weak judgements, which prove flawed again and again.

Scarcity of the Commons

The environmental Left is quick to marshal a different kind of limits-to-growth argument. This one has to do with the scarcity of non-priced common resources and their overuse in production. For example, if a certain activity degrades the environment and those costs are not internalized by producers, they will tend to produce “too much”, leading to some degree of deterioration in human living conditions or the natural quality of the environment. In that case, we might not notice the limits to growth bearing down on us before corrective action is taken. Or so goes the theory that accumulating externalities lead to catastrophe. This is another front along which the limits to growth are asserted, particularly by climate alarmists and the environmental Left. Most prominently today, they contend that increases in atmospheric carbon concentration will lead to an unlivable warming of Earth’s climate.

Sense and Nonsense

The most glaring shortcoming of climate change advocacy is that the trends it decries are exaggerated. I’ve discussed the absurdly brief climate record cited by alarmists in several past posts (many of which appear here). We can start with the contention that carbon emissions are “poison”. In fact, carbon is life nourishing, as we’ve witnessed with the “greening” of the planet at current carbon concentrations of 4 parts per 10,000 of atmospheric gas. Furthermore, a longer historical temperature record using paleoclimate data shows that we are well within the range of past variation, even with the huge distortions to the record caused by urban heat islands and questionable downward adjustments to records of five to 15 decades ago.

The alarmist perspective is also inflamed by simplistic models of carbon forcing that ignore the impact of solar radiation, volcanic activity, and the behavior of aerosols in the atmosphere. Those models have consistently over-predicted temperature trends for decades. Equally troubling is that these models promote the fiction that mankind can control global temperatures by a little fiddling with a “carbon dial”, as if such fiddling could be accomplished without a massive centralization of political and economic power. The panicked narratives related to sea level increases and alleged increases in violent weather are equally flawed.

Growth Can Cure It

Another compelling response to climate arguments against growth is that technological advances have already enabled us to produce power without carbon emissions. Unfortunately, as a matter of public policy (regulation and bad choices by government industrial planners), we have increasingly failed to avail ourselves of these opportunities, instead choosing extremely wasteful methods of generating power. These are the windmill and solar “renewables”, which are resource-intensive, intermittent, low utilization, non-dispatchable, lacking storage for excess generation, intensive in land use (reversing prior accretions), and environmentally disastrous in fabrication, operation, and at disposal. Nuclear power is a far superior technology, especially with the advent of small, modular reactors and potential breakthroughs in fusion energy. These might help to rescue us from the spectacle of bone-headed industrial planning and greedy, renewable-energy rent seekers, but regulators have done seemingly all they can to prevent nuclear facilities from being built.

Just as human ingenuity is capable of expanding the exploitable stock of tradable, priced resources, it is also capable of inventing non-carbon power technologies that are more efficient and less environmentally destructive than ground-based solar and wind. Collection of non-intermittent solar energy in space arrays with wireless transmission to Earth is another promising alternative, as is geothermal energy. And carbon capture technologies show promise for neutralizing emissions or perhaps even reversing carbon concentrations one day, if that is deemed necessary. Much of this development work is in private hands, but barring drastic reductions in scale, the bulk of these efforts are (or will be) dependent on government funding.

It’s worth acknowledging here that resource accretion has a safety component in an expected value sense. Sometimes those risks can be internalized if risk reduction is of value to buyers. But the costs of “reasonable” risk mitigation cannot always be internalized without government action. For example, deflecting asteroid threats to the planet might be done best by private actors, but paying for that activity is a worthy application of public finance. The ability to deflect incoming asteroids is a noteworthy example of resource accretion via risk reduction.

Somehow, governments must be convinced to begin dedicating a larger share of the vast sums they spend on misguided climate interventions (including renewable technologies) to more sensible innovations. We might then benefit from accelerated breakthroughs that would settle not only our energy future, but a great deal of political strife as well. Like the market response to changes in scarcity, creative entrepreneurs will always step forward to compete for government funding. But if you pay them for crap, you’ll get a lot of crap!

Growth Once More

One day we might learn we are reaching the top of an s-curve. We aren’t there yet, if our ongoing accretion of resources is any guide, and there are new frontiers of space and technology to explore. The primary obstacles we face are not natural, but political and regulatory.

One area neglected above is the accretion of human capital. Certainly education is another way to expand our boundaries. However, population growth (and therefore labor force growth) tends to slow as living standards rise, and many argue that demographics have already become a drag on growth. A shrinking and aging population places a tremendous burden on young workers, making other sources of growth and productivity all the more critical. But new physical capital, resource development (including education), and new technologies can all continue to drive productivity and growth.

Growth depends on resource accretion, and there are many ways in which our effective stock of resources can be expanded. That includes enhancements in quantities, efficiencies, and safety. Private investment should be the primary avenue through which these are accomplished, which in turn requires flows of saving. Those flows are much more difficult to conjure without growth, so we have a chicken and egg cross-dependency. But chickens will lay eggs, just as saving and all kinds of investment will take place given the right incentives. Those would promote expansion in our effective stock of resources, improved adaptation to change, and enhanced well being. In the end, the rationale is simple: ending poverty requires growth.

Addendum: I just noticed that Don Boudreaux posted (and beautifully elaborated upon) this great Julian Simon quote:

“The quantity of a natural resource that might be available to us – and even more important the quantity of the services that can eventually be rendered to us by that natural resource – can never be known even in principle, just as the number of points in a one-inch line can never be counted even in principle.”

The Bad News Industrial Complex

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by Nuetzel in Big Government, Corruption, Risk Management

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Beepocalypse, Cronyism, Matt Ridley, NASA, News Media, Oxfam, Precautionary Principle, rent-seeking behavior, Risk Aversion, Risk Mitigation, The Lancet

Matt Ridley had an interesting piece on his blog last month entitled “Bad News Is Sudden, Good News Is Gradual“. It’s about the timing of news, as stated, and it’s about our bias toward bad news more generally. There is no question that bad news tends to be more dramatic than good news. But with steadily increasingly lifespans, growing prosperity, and world poverty at an all-time low, surely good news must come as much or more frequently than bad. But good news can be inconvenient to certain narratives. It is therefore often ignored, and some other purported disaster is found as a substitute:

“Poverty and hunger are the business Oxfam is in, but has it shouted the global poverty statistics from the rooftops? Hardly. It has switched its focus to inequality. When The Lancet published a study in 2010 showing global maternal mortality falling, advocates for women’s health tried to pressure it into delaying publication ‘fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause’, The New York Times reported. The announcement by Nasa in 2016 that plant life is covering more and more of the planet as a result of carbon dioxide emissions was handled like radioactivity by most environmental reporters.“

Tales of bad outcomes can be alluring, especially if they haven’t happened yet. In fact, bad things might even happen gradually, but dark visions of a world beyond the horizon impart a spooky sense of immediacy, and indeed, urgency. Ridley notes the tendency of people to regard pessimists as “wise”, while optimists are viewed as Pollyannas. And he recognizes that risk aversion plays an important role in this psychology. That brings me to the point I found most interesting in Ridley’s piece: the many vested interests in disasters, and disasters foretold.

Risk management is big business in an affluent society. There is a lot to lose, and a squeamish populace is easily cowed by good scare stories. The risk management and disaster-prevention narrative can be wrapped around any number of unlikely or exaggerated threats, serving the interests of the administrative state and private rent-seekers. One particular tool that has been most useful to this alliance is the precautionary principle. It is invoked to discourage or regulate activities presumed to pose risks to the public or to the environment. But there are three dimensions to the application of the precautionary principle: it provides a rationale for public funding of research into the risk-du-jour, for funding projects designed to mitigate its consequences, and for subsidizing development of alternative technologies that might help avoid or reduce the severity of the risk, often at great expense. The exaggeration of risk serves to legitimize these high costs. Of course, the entire enterprise would be impossible without the machinery of the state, in all its venality. Where money flows, graft is sure to follow.

Well-publicized disaster scenarios are helpful to statists in other ways. Risk, its causes, and its consequences are not distributed evenly across regions and populations. A risk thought to be anthropomorphic in nature implies that wealthier and more productive communities and nations must shoulder the bulk of the global costs of mitigation. Thus, the risk-management ethic requires redistribution. Furthermore, wealthier regions are better situated to insulate themselves locally against many risks. Impoverished areas, on the other hand, must be assisted. Finally, an incredible irony of our preoccupation with disaster scenarios is the simultaneous effort to subsidize those deemed most vulnerable even while executing other policies that harm them.

Media organizations and their newspeople obviously benefit greatly from the subtle sensationalism of creeping disaster. As Ridley noted, the gradualism of progress is no match for a scare story on the nightly news. There is real money at stake here, but the media is driven not only by economic incentives. In fact, the dominant leftist ideology in media organizations means that they are more than happy to spread alarm as part of a crusade for state solutions to presumed risks. There are even well-meaning users of social media who jump at the chance to signal their virtue by reposting memes and reports that are couched not merely in terms of risks, but as dire future realities.

Mitigating social risks is a legitimate function of government. Unfortunately, identifying and exaggerating risks, and suppressing contradictory evidence, is in the personal interest of politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, and many members of the media. Everything seems to demand government intervention. Carbon concentration, global warming and sea level changes are glaring examples of exaggerated risks. As Ridley says,

“The supreme case of unfalsifiable pessimism is climate change. It has the advantage of decades of doom until the jury returns. People who think the science suggests it will not be as bad as all that, or that humanity is likely to mitigate or adapt to it in time, get less airtime and a lot more criticism than people who go beyond the science to exaggerate the potential risks. That lukewarmers have been proved right so far cuts no ice.”

Other examples include the “beepocalypse“, genetic modification, drug use, school shootings, and certain risks to national security. Ridley offers the consequences of Brexit as well. There, I’ve listed enough sacred cows to irritate just about everyone.

In many cases, the real crises have more to do with government activism than the original issue with which they were meant to reckon. Which brings me to a discomfiting vision of my own: having allowed the administrative state to metastasize across almost every social organ and every aspect of our lives, a huge risk to our future well-being is continuing erosion of personal and economic liberties and our ability to prosper as a society. Here’s Ridley’s close:

“Activists sometimes justify the focus on the worst-case scenario as a means of raising consciousness. But while the public may be susceptible to bad news they are not stupid, and boys who cry ‘wolf!’ are eventually ignored. As the journalist John Horgan recently argued in Scientific American: ‘These days, despair is a bigger problem than optimism.'”

Administrative Cost Causers

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by Nuetzel in monopoly

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Baumol's Disease, CATO Institute, Compliance Costs, Cost Disease, Health Care, Infrastructure Development, John Cochrane, Public education, Risk Mitigation, Ryan Bourne, Scott Alexander, Sir John Hicks, Slate Star Codex, Third-Party Payers

messy-desk

Certain enterprises seem plagued by declining productivity and increasing costs, or what is sometimes called the “cost disease”. This includes such areas as education, health care, and infrastructure development. Prompted by a fascinating post by Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex, John Cochrane boils things down to administrative bloat, sometimes caused by regulation. He also identifies a lack of competition as a cause of the bloat. To that I would add institutional arrangements like third-party payments that create gaps between the scheduled prices established by payers and the user’s willingness to pay. Ryan Bourne at the CATO Institute also comments on Alexander’s post; he presents a framework for analysis but demurs from weighing-in on the causes because the U.S. lacks a proper index of public sector output. He mentions Cochrane’s post, but essentially ignores his contribution to the discussion, which I believe is essential to understanding the phenomenon described by Alexander.

The facts are: 1) costs in K – 12 education have tripled since 1970 (but not the student population), while student achievement has remained flat; as a consequence, productivity in education has declined by two-thirds! Alexander notes, “College is even worse.” 2) The cost of health care has increased by 400% since 1970. While longevity has increased and treatments for many ills have improved, we have not enjoyed a 400% improvement in health care delivery and outcomes, and other developed countries achieve the same outcomes at much lower cost; 3) the cost of new infrastructure has increased drastically in the U.S. Alexander cites the cost of the new subway extension in New York City ($2.2 billion per kilometer) at a cost of about 10 – 50 times that of equivalent projects in other parts of the world. These are just a few examples.

What explains these rampant cost increases? Economists are often tempted to attribute such phenomena to “Baumol’s disease“, which holds that sectors in which productivity is relatively static will experience increasing costs due to advances in productivity in other sectors. A classic example is an orchestra. In the act of playing a particular piece of music, an orchestra today has about the same productivity as an orchestra of 200 years ago (though technology can make musicians more productive in other ways). But as productivity grows for workers in the rest of the economy, their real wages will increase. Musicians, and potential future musicians, will then face a steeper tradeoff in their decision to proceed with musical careers. This tendency will increase their reservation wages as musicians. Moreover, consumers achieving more affluence from their work in other sectors — higher real wages — may demand more concerts, and some of those benefits will flow to members of the orchestra.

Have the orchestra’s costs increased without any corresponding increase in real productivity? Well, that argument isn’t quite cinched, since the real wages of the orchestra members and the real revenue derived from their productivity have both increased. Nevertheless, Alexander presents data showing that the real pay of public school teachers, hospital workers, and most physicians (excepting some specialists) has been stagnant, so at least those crucial labor inputs do not account for the increasing costs. While the pay of construction workers has undoubtedly increased, it cannot plausibly account for the cost increases in infrastructure development. But here is Alexander:

“I don’t have a similar graph for subway workers, but come on. The overall pictures is that health care and education costs have managed to increase by ten times without a single cent of the gains going to teachers, doctors, or nurses.”

So what might explain the “cost disease” plaguing these sectors? Alexander discusses, and dismisses, several possible theories, and finally settles on a very partial cause: regulation. From personal experience, I can attest to the bizarre commitment of large pools of talent to regulatory compliance. And there is validity to the argument that this bloat is related to legal risks, which organizations attempt to mitigate by creating layers of controls. Cochrane agrees that the real answer is sometimes related to regulation, but the explanation is much broader:

“The ratio of teachers to students hasn’t gone down a lot — but the ratio of administrators to students has shot up. Most large public school systems spend more than half their budget on administrators. Similarly, class sizes at most colleges and universities haven’t changed that much — but administrative staff have exploded. There are 2.5 people handling insurance claims for every doctor. Construction sites have always had a lot of people standing around for every one actually working the machine. But now for every person operating the machine there is an army of planners, regulators, lawyers, administrative staff, consultants and so on.”

Cochrane shines a light on perhaps the most important reason for administrative bloat: an absence of competition:

“These are all areas either run by the government or with large government involvement. …with not much competition. In turn, however, they are not by a long shot ‘natural monopolies’ or failure of some free market. The main effect of our regulatory and legal system is not so much to directly raise costs, as it is to lessen competition (that is often its purpose). The lack of competition leads to the cost disease.

Though textbooks teach that monopoly leads to profits, it doesn’t. ‘The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’ said Hicks. Everywhere we see businesses protected from competition, especially highly regulated businesses, we see the cost disease spreading. And it spreads largely by forcing companies to hire loads of useless people.“

The quote of Sir John Hicks is particularly informative. Protection from competition means that profits are less risky. The protected monopolist’s profits might be limited by social contract, but they are subject to less business risk. Hicks’ observation suggests that monopolists are likely to take a more langourous approach to cost control.

There is another characteristic shared by public education, health care and infrastructure: not only do those enterprises face minimal, if any, competition, but there is a disconnection between the users of those services and the payers. The cost of public education to taxpayers often bears no relationship to their use of the system. The cost of health care is often borne by third-party payers, rather than patients. The users of public infrastructure are seldom asked to cover its costs. So while monopoly is worse than competition, third-party payments free users of the responsibility to make decisions at the margin, short-circuiting the role of consumer incentives in controlling costs. This could manifest in increasing marginal costs, but it is very likely to enable or even require administrative bloat to take place.

Free of competition, and with customers who do not face tradeoffs between usage and price, providers will manage both their services and costs based on rules established by third-parties, and worse, by multiple layers of payers (as when government subsidizes insurers, when employers offer insurance coverage, and when government subsidizes those employers for doing so). Third-party payers are sometimes lacking in information or direct control (e.g., taxpayers). Payers often face incentives that do not promote efficient delivery of services for which they are obligated to pay. The standards by which costs are justified are seldom subjected to a true market test.

If Cochrane is right, that cost disease is driven by administrative bloat, which in turn is often a consequence of regulation, a lack of competition, and third-party payments, then several general solutions suggest themselves: first, regulate lightly; second, promote competition; third, rely on direct, non-subsidized payments by users whenever possible. In education, these guidelines mean giving public schools more autonomy and allowing parental choice. For health care, they mean an end to mandates and regulatory burdens on insurers, employers and providers, allowing consumer choice in selecting health coverage, ending prohibitions on competition in the insurance marketplace, and eliminating tax subsidies. In infrastructure, the guidelines support streamlining the review process for infrastructure projects, avoiding subsidies to over-invest, relying more heavily on user fees to pay for infrastructure, and expanding the role of private developers and operators of infrastructure facilities.

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