It is natural for many people to get the erroneous impression that the world is running out of resources. Dr, Rebecca McCracken, a local physical therapist, is among myriad folks under the false impression that the world's resources are drying up when she says, "The more people we have the more we run out.”
The basis for this impression is that everywhere you look you see fuel being burned up, metals corroding and piles of trash being hauled to the junkyard. Without further information, it is very natural to assume that we must be running out of resources.
A corollary of this nonsense is that Americans are selfish and evil because they are using more resources per capita than any other nation. The “doom and gloom” people have forecast that the people of the world will be living in abject poverty because we are running out of resources.
Contrary to this impression so many have, the exact opposite is true. You find that virtually every economic commodity used by man is becoming cheaper in absolute terms.
Since economic availability is the only criterion that counts you are forced to conclude that we are certainly not running out of resources.
This fact is clearly illustrated by a bet between Paul Ehrlich, a well-known proponent of the shortage myth and conservative Julian Simon.
Ehrlich was challenged to a bet by Simon: Ehrlich was to pick five metals. They put together a hypothetical basket containing $ 200 worth of each commodity, for a total of $ 1000 worth of metals. If the basket went up in absolute price over the next ten years, Simon would pay Ehrlich the amount the basket went up. If the basket went down in price in the next ten years, Ehrlich would pay Simon for the amount it went down..The basket made up of copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten went down by more than half. Every single metal in the basket picked by Ehrlich went down.
Ehrlich also made dire predictions about the amount of food available for the world’s people. He predicted catastrophic worldwide famine by the year 1980. We know now that the total amount of food has been increasing and the food per capita has been increasing. Any starvation seen today in the modern world is due to government policy. It is not due to any natural inability of the earth to produce enough food.
The main reason the earth is not and never will run out of resources is that the mind of man is continually finding cheaper and better ways to extract resources or find substitutes for them.
Man is forever finding ways to create new economic resources out of things that were formerly useless.
For example, there was a time when finding oil on your property was a darned nuisance because it was bad for farming and raising cattle and there were no cars. Sand has gone from a nuisance in your shoe to concrete to glass to microcircuits.
There is no limitation to man's ability to solve problems and create new things other than the limits he places on himself. For this reason, our economic lives are always getting better.