Counter Intuitives

The more of something we use, the less scarce it will become (so sayeth Julian Simon through several examples) ...

Even as gasoline consumption increases, we have seen increased availability of gasoline, the prices have in general decreased over time - our purchasing power has increased. Why? Because with impending scarcity, humans adapt/innovate - we get better at searching/producing - improving.

So, if more of us started driving SUV's and consuming more gas, would that be a good thing? Yes, in short. Those that can afford such, when they consume more, it will stimulate more economic activity - in production, search, transportation and so on ... the issue with increase in CO2 is ofcourse something that we have been asked to consider - there are some that believe that CO2 is as deadly as the worst, dangerous gases created by chemical processing - and that's simply not true. I will write about that separately.

Imagine the PC in 1984 - and where we are today (2010) - even as more and more people have PC's (OK, Mac's also!) the price per (CPU/RAM/hard drive space/videos/...) has gone down steadily ... People buying PC's sent the signal that more can be sold - and people came up with better ideas for better PC's - Moore's Law took over - We have not seen the end in sight (yes, we have heard about the limits of production of chips - as the feature sizes shrink, it gets more and more expensive to make the microprocessors - yet, the price of a final assembled PC keeps falling - because we are getting more bang for the same buck - Is there a limit? I do not know - have not read about any limit - When we are unable to shrink features on silicon, we may discover newer materials OR other techniques to speed up the processor - just recently there were reports of quantum computing - when implemented, it will make today's Super Fast Computers/Crays look like the 1984 PC's ... so, no, I do not see limits to where we are headed ...