Why Malthus's Gospel of Growth Was, and Still Is, Wrong
First, as my Berkeley mentor Richard Norgaard (economics PhD at Chicago, with Milton Friedman curiously) showed, prices say more about the beliefs of the investors who buy commodities than about long-term physical scarcity. Second, prices also depend on (un)fair trade, labour/environmental protections, military/geopolitical power, and paying, or not, the social/ecological costs of extraction. Third, and to joke, a bigger population means more innovators solving old problems, but also more evildoers creating new ones. But yes, Ehrlich was wrong about looming shortages and famines. The quest...
Source: cato-unbound.org
