Why don’t we run out of non-renewable resources?

Matt Ridley:

There is not a single example of a nonrenewable resource that has run out. Nobody ran out of stone in the stone age, iron in the iron age, or bronze in the bronze age. That’s not why these ages peter out, it’s rather because we move on to something else ..whereas renewable resources tend to run out, like whales, passenger pigeons, and white pines.

(Hat-tip to Falkenblog)

Why do we not run out of non-renewable things like metals, of which no more is being made; but do tend to run out of renewable things like big game?

Two related thoughts:

The difference between stocks and flows. Broadly, a stock is the amount of something that you have, and a flow is the rate at which it is being replaced or added to (a bath full of water is a stock of water, and the rate it is being filled from the tap is a flow). Non-renewables have a flow of zero, but the stocks are massive. Renewables do have a flow, but the stocks are small and the flow is not flowing quickly enough.

Technological advances that increase the rate at which we can access resources. A breakthrough in oil extraction technology effectively increases our stock of oil, because we have made more if it accessible. More people with more guns, or more fishing boats with bigger nets, do not serve to make more fish and game accessible, they just increase the speed with which we harvest.

Toasters, pencils, and collective intelligence

Matt Ridley claims that

Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon

Look around your home, think about the stuff you own and the services you use. Could you have produced any of it on your own? Even if you are handy at carpentry, could you have built even the simplest item of furniture when you consider that you first need to harvest the wood and shape it with metal tools. How much could you – on your own – produce from primary materials, from ore and wood and hydrocarbons?

I, Pencil is a classic essay which talks about how no-one – literally no-one – knows how to make something as simple as a pencil. We depend entirely on a complex and unguided network of people filling there own particular role to produce what we take for granted.

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!

In this TED Talk, Thomas Thwaites describes his mission to build a toaster from scratch. Maximum points for effort, but the final specimen really hammers home how much we depend on the actions of other people.

In his own TED Talk of last year, Matt Ridley was pursuing the theory behind the practice of Thwaites was demonstrating – ideas having sex.

What are you moaning about this week?

I was asked the other day what I had been moaning about in the last week. It took me a moment to realise I was being asked what I had been blogging about (this was an off-line, real world conversation).

I was going to call this post “Reasons to be cheerful”, and highlight the blog posts in which I am optimistic and of a sunny disposition. Turns out there aren’t many of them, so that’s that plan scratched.

But I don’t FEEL like a moany old git. I know it may not sound like it sometimes but I am actually optimistic about the big things – just like Matt Ridley. You need to think about the bad stuff in order to work out how to solve it – just like Frank. Having dreams and aspirations requires you to think about how you want your life to be, and hence how it isn’t as good as can be – just like me, here.

Matt Ridley – When Ideas Have Sex

Matt Ridley is one of the people who had a great influence on my thinking.  In the mid nineties, when I was in my early-mid teens, he wrote a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph (the paper my parents got) called Acid Test.  The weekly topics varied widely, but included economics, science, human behaviour and the like.  Each column would follow a similar pattern:

• He would introduce an often topical piece of conventional wisdom
• He would tell you that it was wrong
• He would tell you why it was wrong in theory
• Then he would give several examples showing it to be wrong in practice

Later I would come to read several of his books, including The Red Queen and The Origins of Virtue.

Here he is speaking at TEDGlobal 2010.