178 The Political Economy of Resource Use 



belong in this category, but it is difficult to find other clear examples. 

 The effect on future yields of overgrazing on public lands was clearly 

 a concern of early conservationists, but the trouble here was not 

 mainly with the price system but with the lack of it. Obviously an un- 

 restricted entry to grazing lands at little or no cost inevitably led to 

 this undesired result. Our oil policy has been primarily concerned with 

 elimination of wastes in the form of external diseconomies, with sub- 

 sidizing discovery and development, and with price maintenance. Con- 

 sideration of a "proper" time distribution in the rate of use has played 

 a relatively small role. Even our soil conservation measures, including 

 the current "soil bank," have been mainly directed to the problem of 

 farm surpluses. Practically all our natural resource policies, it is true, 

 have had some effect on the time rate of use, but very few have been 

 designed specifically to accomplish this purpose. 



Does this mean that we have been wasting our resources in low- 

 priority consumption at the expense of future generations? If "future" 

 means the next twenty-five to fifty years the answer is quite clearly 

 "no." If, however, we try to push our time horizon much further into 

 the future an attempt to answer this question is bedevilled, on the one 

 hand, by the effect on resource requirements of growth at exponential 

 rates and, on the other hand, the effect on resource availabilities of 

 unforeseen and unforeseeable technological changes. It has been cal- 

 culated that, if the population of the United States expanded expo- 

 nentially — that is, on a compound interest basis — at a rate of 3 per 

 cent per annum, a rate which ruled during the period 1790-1860, we 

 should have in this country just four square feet per person by 2314 

 A.D.-^ According to another calculation, growth of the world's peoples 

 at current rates would produce by 4000 a.d. a population with a total 

 weight equal to the weight of the earth. If now we imagine the con- 

 sumption of this population growing at the 2 per cent per capita per 

 annum to which we have become accustomed in the United States, 

 total raw material requirements per annum would add up to many 

 times the weight of the earth. Reflection on the effects, over time, of 

 compound interest calculations have led many people to gloomy views 

 indeed. The former director of the Medical Division of The Rockefeller 



^^ M. King Hubbert, "Economic Transition and Its Human Consequences," 

 Advanced Management, July-September 1941. 



