In 1865 William Jevons began to see that people would begin to use more and more natural resources. He eventually concluded that the increased efficiency would eventually lead to having no more of a particular natural resource. As innovations became more and more common more natural resources would be used, such as coal. Since coal began to become very popular in many machines that were available to the normal everyday people, the demand for coal got greater, maybe even too great. He sees this as a huge threat to the economy as one day no more coal will be available. Which today is still happening, the shortage of oil lead to increase gas prices which was in affect of our economy beginning to fail.
Basically this reading is saying that our economy always needs to move forward. If do we not make forward progression our economy will crash and fail. If we wanted an economy that would hover in one place like a helicopter, we would need to greatly change many things about our economy, which could takes years.
1.) Jevons was more worried about having the economy fail due to the growing popularity of coal. Since many innovations were beginning to use coal he figured that the price of coal was going to rise. If most inventions and innovations were starting to use coal and the price was going to continue to rise, the price to obtain coal would be almost impossible. This would leave the economy in shambles as most of its utilities and inventions ran on coal. Not only would the normal everyday consumers find it hard to afford, the government and the country would eventually run out of money to but it.
2.) A plane is designed for forward motion whereas a helicopter is able to hover in one spot or move in any direction it would like to. The comparison between a plane and a helicopter basically means our economy cannot hover in one position. It is like a plane and must constantly move forward. If the plane tries to hover it will crash. Since our economy is always moving forward with some incline and declining motion we cannot make our economy a helicopter. In order to convert a plane into a helicopter it must first land and our economy is a never ending forward motion.
Is our economy going to completely crash?
If people since 1865 have seen this coming why have we not paid bigger attention towards depleting these natural resources?
Nobody has a crystal ball. We could experience a civilizational collapse, or we could invent/discover our way out of our current problems, at least for now.
ReplyDeleteJevons was taken somewhat seriously at the time, but two things happened. First, he was misinterpreted as saying we would run out of coal, when what he was actually concerned about was running out of _cheap_ coal that could support ever-increasing use. When we didn't run out of coal, people assumed he was wrong, since they had misinterpreted what he had meant to say. The other thing that happened was that oil rose in prominence, partly displacing coal. So even though Britain ran out of cheap coal, its economy continued to grow, powered now by expanding use of cheap _oil_.