Is Freedom Worth the Price of our Future?

We face a global conundrum. The planet is going to shit. We all know it on some level. The ice caps are melting. There is now more plastic in the ocean than fishes. Humans have killed off 80 percent of the animal life (other than ourselves, natch) on the planet and we’re working on the rest.

There are two main ways to think about the problem. The first is based on the idea that we’re going to run out of resources. This idea goes back all the way to the 1700s to Thomas Malthus, who saw populations rising at an exponential rate while food production increased on a far slower scale. He thought that by the end of the century there would be mass starvation and so population should be controlled. He’s not the first nor the last to say that the planet has too many people, although he was thinking less globally than is possible now.

Malthus was wrong. What happened was that the surge of people created sufficient disruptions to the existing ways of operating, and new technologies evolved that transformed agricultural production. Enough food was produced and disaster averted. The people who focus on the capacity for technical change to address resource scarcity issues are usually economists who study exactly how scarcity affects prices, incentives to adapt, and resource scarcity.

In standard resource economics, once a technology (let’s say oil-based energy systems, for example) become expensive enough due to scarcity or high demand, then the next generation technology (let’s say solar power for…