Category — Hayek, F. A.

“Running out of resources” has been a common refrain among the intellectual class and policymakers since the beginning of the oil industry. L. C. Gray (1913) and Harold Hotelling (1931) cemented the fixity-depletion view of minerals that swept the economics profession; so did the presidency of Jimmy Carter, in the (regulatory-induced) troubled 1970s.

Remember the lament of James Schlesinger, the  first energy secretary for Carter’s new Department of Energy: “We have a classic Malthusian case of exponential growth against a finite source.” And the confident conclusion of Amory Lovins:

All oil and gas resources should be carefully husbanded—i.e. extracted as late and as slowly as possible. Our descendents will be grateful. We, too, shall need a long bridge to the future.

But when surplus conditions with oil and gas returned in the 1980s, the lost voices of Erich Zimmermann and M. A. Adelman, and the new voice of Julian Simon, found an audience.

Planned Conservation (Conservationism)

The depletionist worldview raised the question of what was the ‘right’ consumption profile, which inevitably involved government intervention to correct the alleged ‘market failure’ of overproduction/overconsumption. Enter F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), one of the century’s leading critics of government planning.

In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek evaluated “the necessity of central direction of the conservation of natural resources,” a view that was “particularly strong in the United States, where the ‘conservation movement’ has to a great extent been the source of the agitation for economic planning and has contributed much to the indigenous ideology of the radical economic reformers.” [1] [Read more →]