I don’t expect we’ll get less wealthy until critical resources start to sharply diminish, and even then a robust economy can find suitable replacements (though only after a period of relative hardship and shortages). The iron age, for example, may have started when a tin shortage made bronze tools more expensive if not impossible to acquire. In the near future, oil might be largely traded off for wind, solar and/or nuclear energy. Are there any major resources that are getting harder and harder to find and don’t have likely substitutes?
Hmm, that sounds kind of unlikely. Members of Edwardian “middle class” categories such as “minor office functionaries” these days generally don’t command six-figure salaries.
According to 2001 US Census figures, the percentage of US households with household income $100,000 or more is less than 18% of all households. (And by no means all of those households have full-time servants of their own.) Would all employers of live-in household servants in Edwardian Britain, from low-level office clerks all the way up to the Queen, really have fit into the top one-fifth of the population?
I’m not going to get into the servant debate because I know of no good reference to the proportion of office flunkies having servants.
Looking at our actually resource potential, I exect we can hold out indefinitely. Asteroid mining isn’t neccessarily all that hard, with the right power supply. Fusion may be difficult, but it’s all a matter of engineering. And realistically, mineral resources are our only truly limited ones. We can manufacture everything else.
The key, though, is that comfortable societies don’t advance. It’s not impossible to mine asteroids (I think mining the moon would be much easier) but the amount of capital investment required is so huge that the only way anyone would do it is if they feel forced to. Left to their own devices, for example, western consumers would gladly keep buying SUVs. Oil prices will have to be considerably higher (comparable, adjusted for inflation, to the mid-seventies) before we see another trend toward smaller vehicles.
I’m waiting for the inevitible collapse of the house of Saud and subsequent oil crisis to make the west sufficient uncomfortable that nuclear power (specifically fusion) starts to look like it’s worth the time and investment. It’s reasonable to expect there will be an economic depression (thus a diminishing of overall wealth) while the changeover occurs, but we’ll be ultimately better off. It’d just suck to be on the verge of retiring when this happens and watch the value of one’s life savings diminish at a time when personal income drops to zero.
Interestingly, while doing some reading on the early iron age, I find some theories that iron was considered inferior to bronze, but was only pursued because tin was prohibitively expensive. It wasn’t until widepsread experimentation showed that mixing in a bit of carbon to make steel (and this was certainly not predictable by early metalsmiths) gave a much better result. We enjoy railroads and heavy industry and other steel-dependent technologies only by accident, because had the metalsmiths of ~1200 BC had unlimited tin, they’d’ve been happy to keep making bronze indefinitely.
Actually, no. There are a few interesting technologies that would make it amazingly cheap. With fusion power we could handily fire missiles at asteroids, melt them remotely. They’ll naturally expand into large, liquid spheres which we can pump full of air, making a nice space station to work with.
Really, with fusion energy we can get all the minerals we need. With minerals, we can get all the chemicals we need. Bam, we have everything.
Finally, resource depletion may be a problem, but today we experiment and search for every possible advantage anyway. It may mean slower progress in one respect, but we’re tarding that off for great long-term potential. We would probably a;ready be using massive amounts of nuclear energy; it was only social prohobitions that get in the way.
Quite frankly, that’s ridiculous. Unless you have a really weird definition of “science” or don’t know much about economics, of COURSE it’s a science.
I don’t know about society as a whole, but I’m certainly wealthier. 30 years ago, all I owned was a bunch of toys and crap.
Perhaps, but it’s dismal.
You missed my point. It’s not really fair to compare minor office flunky in the middleages to minor office flunky today. Instead, what should be compared is percentiles. A minor office flunky back then might be wealthier than 90% of the country. Someone making $200,000 a year now might be wealthier than 90% of the country.
Hey, I didn’t say it was happy joy fun science!
It was the physicists who designed Happy Fun Ball.
Microeconomics is a science.
Macroeconics is an inter-denominational of religious soceity.
