Premium
On the Possibility of Continuing Expansion of Finite Resources
Author(s) -
Baumol William J.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
kyklos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.766
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1467-6435
pISSN - 0023-5962
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6435.1986.tb00766.x
Subject(s) - economics , consumption (sociology) , natural resource , welfare , zero (linguistics) , technological change , social welfare , industrial revolution , natural resource economics , neoclassical economics , market economy , macroeconomics , political science , sociology , social science , law , philosophy , linguistics
SUMMARY Because technological change increases the efficiency of the extraction and use of natural resources it is shown that, despite the accelerated use of the world's finite resources since the Industrial Revolution, it is very possible that their effective remaining supply, measured in terms of the services they are still capable of providing in the future, is greater today than it was, say, two centuries earlier. In this paper it is shown that, paradoxically, measured in terms of their prospective contributions to human welfare, the available quantity of the world's exhaustible resources may rise forever, year after year. However, even though they may never approach disappearance, the consumption of their services will eventually have to decline and, ultimately, approach zero asymptotically.