Robert Bryce dives deep into the astounding technological and economic advances of the last 200 years as he ponders Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong.
Innovation leading to technological advances creates wealth, improves health, and makes everyone better off. Some people in some places have been left behind by the dramatic economic improvements of the last two centuries. The best way to make life better for those folks is to continue innovating and make cheap, small, fast, highly economical tools and resources available to them.
The book as so many explanations and illustrations. I’d love to describe dozens of things that caught my eye. I will mention merely a few.
You will often see the foolish and erroneous statement that we only have X years of some resource left on the planet. When you look at the built-in calculation you see the presence of the silly fallacy of dividing known reserves by current consumption.
The reason that calculation is so foolish is it completely ignores exploration that finds new fields, innovation in recovering more resources, and economic changes that make it worthwhile to gather something that was uneconomical before.
Consider for a moment the idea that we are going to run out of oil because at current consumption rates will use up all the proven reserves in however many years. The formula is
- proven reserves
- divided by current consumption
- equals years until we completely, totally exhaust all of that item on the entire planet
