Human beings are the ultimate natural resource
A guy named Julian Simon said that there is a meaningful sense in which we will never run out of any raw materials. He backed up his claim with scads of data and references. His book "The Ultimate Resource II" is loaded with good news for the human race and for the environment. And his web site makes the text available for free.
Ultimate Resource II online
One of the chapter titles is "Why Are Material-Technical Resource Forecasts So Often Wrong?"
My favorite story about Julian Simon is the one where he made a bet with a famous doomsayer, and Julian won the bet.
David Oakey
posted by David Oakey @ 10:02 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting point. As a general question, how should one respond when an otherwise trusted prognosticator makes a wrong prediction?
My tentative answer is to take the prognosticator's ratio of right guesses to wrong guesses as a baseline level of trust, and then reduce it some more as a penalty. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
I suppose I should somehow factor in the difficulty of guessing the future. On the other hand, that factor should just make me skeptical of all predictions about the future from anybody.
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