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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.”

Coronavirus: Framing the Next Few Weeks

19 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by Nuetzel in Pandemic

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aaron Ginn, Co-morbidity, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Diamond Process, Endless Metrics, Envelope Membrane, Gompertz curves, Insights and Outliers, Medium.com, Mortality, Pandemic, S-Curve, Scott Alexander, Seasonal Flu, Sigmoid Function, SlateStarCodex, Transmissibility, Willis Eschenbach

See my March 28 update here.

What follows is an exercise intended to put the coronavirus in perspective as we move through a crucial phase in the U.S. I believe it’s more informative than speculative. However, I’m relying on several pieces of information in establishing bounds on how the caseload and mortality rate will play out over the next few months: the experience abroad; domestic developments thus far; risk mitigation; prospective treatments; and some mathematics.

Pandemic Progressions

Despite all the warnings we’ve heard about exponential growth in the number of infections, that is something characterizing only the earliest stages of epidemics. These episodes invariably follow a growth curve that accelerates for a time before tapering. The total number of individuals infected eventually flattens, like the top of the dashed red line in the chart below. Think of the blue line’s height as showing the number of new positive diagnoses each day. New cases (blue) peak as the slope of the red line, total positive diagnoses, begins to decrease. The blue line is the one we’d like to flatten. That’s because once the number of new cases exceeds a certain threshold, medical resources can no longer handle the load. Nevertheless, I’ll focus on the red line and how it’s growth accelerates and then decelerates. Where are various countries on that curve? 

I’ve been using the interactive tool at the Insights and Outliers web site to view curves like the red line above, by country. China and South Korea are at the top, where the line is flat, though I discount the Chinese numbers as quite likely manipulated. Italy is somewhere in the middle of the red curve — one hopes it will enter the deceleration phase soon, but it’s not clear from the numbers.

Setting Context

The U.S. caseload is accelerating; it will continue to accelerate until the availability of tests catches up with demand from individuals meeting the qualifications for testing. The delay in the availability of tests, which I mentioned in an earlier post, will exaggerate the acceleration in the number of diagnosed cases for another week, or perhaps a bit more. Some of those cases already existed, and we should have known about them before now. However, after starting high, the U.S. death rate from the virus is already well below the global death rate, suggesting that either 1) our testing is actually well ahead of the rest of the world; 2) our Covid-19 mortality is, and will be, lower than the rest of the world; or 3) deaths in the U.S. will increase much faster than new diagnoses over the next few weeks. I seriously doubt the latter given the high quality of U.S. health care, the time of year, and the promising treatments that have recently been approved for use.

I expect the daily number of new cases in the U.S. to fall after the “catch-up” in testing. That’s based on a combination of things: first, the time from infection to first symptoms can be up to about 14 days, but the mean is just five days. Second, in the U.S., we began to practice “social distancing” and “self-quarantine” in earnest just this past week. Among those infected before this week, those who develop symptoms serious enough to notice will know before the end of March. But people are still out trying to take care of business. Some of those people will catch the virus, and there will be secondary infections of family members or others in close proximity to individuals diagnosed earlier. It will take an additional week, accounting for overlap, for infections among that cohort to mature. Nevertheless, over the next three weeks, the number of infections transmitted to new “hosts” will fall drastically with social distancing, as each of us comes into contact with fewer people. 

Third, the transmissibility of the virus will decrease with rising temperatures, more direct sunlight, and higher absolute humidity. See my post on the topic here. I know, I know, skeptics wag their fingers and say, “Covid-19 is not the same as the flu virus”, and they’re right! It has some similarities, however: a so-called “envelope” lipid membrane, transmissability via fine aerosols or larger droplets expelled into the air by infected individuals, and symptoms that are similar, except for shortness of breath with Covid-19. And like the flu, the new virus seems to be more virulent in cold, dry environments. If you cannot avoid contact with other individuals during your workday, if you have a large family at home, or if you live in quarters with a number of other individuals, it might be a good idea to keep your humidifier on or don’t air-condition aggressively. That’s an implication of this study and this study:

“The current spread suggests a degree of climate determination with Coronavirus displaying preference for cool and dry conditions. The predecessor SARS-CoV was linked to similar climate conditions.”

Bounding Expectations

How high will the numbers go? I’ll start by establishing some “very good” and “very bad” scenarios for total confirmed cases. South Korea (where masks were used widely) has had an excellent experience thus far. The county’s cumulative confirmed cases flattened out at less than 0.017% (0.00017) of the total population. Assuming that 90% of cases are asymptomatic and undiagnosed, that would mean 0.17% (0.0017) of the South Korean population has been infected. If the U.S. experience is the same, we’d have a total of about 60,000 confirmed infections when our curve flattens. But I won’t be that optimistic — we’re at about 25,000 cases already and I think we’ll be at 60,000 cases within a week. Instead, I’ll define the “very good” scenario as 2.5x the South Korean outcome, or 150,000 confirmed cases. 

For a “very bad” scenario one might look to Italy. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to say how much higher Italy’s case load will go before flattening. If it had flattened today (it didn’t), the rate of confirmed cases for the country would be 0.077% (0.00077). That yields 0.77% of the population including the undiagnosed at 90% of cases. Applying the same percentage to the U.S. would mean just over 250,000 confirmed cases. But again, for a really bad scenario, and because we don’t yet know how Italy’s experience will play out, let’s suppose Italy’s confirmed cases quadruple: For the U.S., using the same percentage of the population would imply just over 1 million confirmed cases, or about 1.6% of the population. That yields a total infected population of 10 million.  

I’ve illustrated these “very good” and “very bad” scenarios in the chart below as Gompertz curves, a form of sigmoid function or s-curve. First, a couple of caveats: Please note that this represents a “first wave” of the virus, as it were. I do not dismiss the possibility of a second wave should we relax our nonprescription safeguards prematurely, and obviously the chart does not speak to a return of the virus in the fall. Also, these are just two examples that allow us to examine the implications of extreme outcomes. I could have varied the timing, growth, and end-outcome in other ways, but I think the following is instructive.

The chart shows cumulative confirmed cases for each scenario. It also shows the actual confirmed case total through March 21st, which is the shorter red line at the bottom. The data plotted begins on March 6, when there were 248 cases confirmed. The horizontal axis shows days elapsed since then. The accompanying table shows the same information through March 28th, a week from today. 

There are a few things to note about the chart and table:

  1. The actual curve is still below the “very good” curve. If our experience proves to be marginally worse than the “very good” scenario, then we’ve already “caught-up” in terms of testing for Covid-19: the actual increase today is larger than the highest daily increases under that scenario. If our experience approaches the “very bad” scenario, then we are eight days behind in our testing. That is, today’s actual increase is about what that scenario would have predicted eight days ago.
  2. Under the “very good” scenario, the daily increase in cases would peak by Friday, March 27. We’ve already exceeded that level of daily increase, but it will be encouraging if the daily increase doesn’t accelerate much more over the next few days. Under the “very bad” scenario, and given a full “catch-up”, the daily increase would peak about a week from now at approximately 37,000. That would be delayed if the catch-up process is more protracted.
  3. New cases flatten out within a couple of months under both scenarios. Under the “very good” scenario, new cases fall below 1,000 per day by April 21. Under the “very bad’ scenario, they don’t reach that level until Mid-May.
  4. In the next week (by March 28th), we will know a lot more about where we’re trending relative to these scenarios. I plan to provide an update later in the week or next weekend. 

While it can’t be seen from the chart or the table, once the “catch-up” ends, if there really is a catch-up involved, the daily increase in cases might fall abruptly. That would be encouraging.

Other Thoughts

It’s also important to note that the experience within the U.S. might be as varied as what we see around the globe. For example, New York and Washington state seem to be hot spots. Cities with large international ports and flights are more likely to suffer relatively high infection rates. In contrast, St. Louis probably won’t have a comparable incidence of infection, as there are so few international flights terminating there. 

The global death rate from Covid-19 has been widely quoted as somewhere around 4%, but that came into question with the revelation of low mortality aboard the Diamond Princess, despite the many seniors aboard. And it appears that the death rate from coronavirus is declining in the U.S. This was noted here at Endless Metrics several days ago. It’s also discussed in some detail by Aaron Ginn in this excellent this Medium article. Again, the death rate will decline as our testing “catches-up”, if indeed it must, and it will decline with spring weather as well as treatments if they are effective. Ultimately, I’ll be surprised if it comes in at more than 1% of confirmed cases in the U.S., and I won’t be surprised if it’s much less. At 1% under the “very bad” scenario, the U.S. would have about 10,000 deaths associated with coronavirus, the large majority of which would be individuals older than 70 years of age with significant co-morbidities.  

Conclusion

I hope this exercise proves useful to others in establishing a framing for what will ensue over the next few weeks. However, even the “very bad” scenario discussed above involves an infected share of the population of much less than we’ve heard we’re in for. Yet that scenario is far worse than Italy’s experience thus far, which most people consider pretty bad. For this reason, I am increasingly convinced that this pandemic will not prove to be the widespread calamity we’re still being told to expect. Those warning us might be alarmists, or perhaps they simply lack a sufficient level of numeracy.

This post was partly inspired by The Math of Epidemics by Willis Eschenbach, as well as Scott Alexander’s March 2nd post at Slate Star Codex. Also, see the Medium article by Aaron Ginn. It is a thorough examination of many aspects of the pandemic and very much aligned with my views. (Something is wrong with the link … I’ll try to fix it later.)

 

 

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