… is from page 10 of Wilfred Beckerman’s excellent 2003 monograph, A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development and Economic Growth:
In fact, of course, not only are resources not finite in any relevant sense, but the evidence of all past history, including even the relatively recent past, shows that there have been no trends toward the exhaustion of any resources that matter. Similarly, past history is littered with predictions of imminent resource [exhaustion or increasing] scarcity that have been subsequently falsified.
DBx: Among the most counterintuitive of sound economic principles is the fact that resources are not finite. Resources are scarce, but they are not finite. Economic supplies of resources are not fixed. As Julian Simon taught so eloquently, human creativity can, and does, discover additional sources of resources, additional substitutes for today’s resources, and the means of getting more and more output out of a given physical quantity of resources.
