“Political stabilization … allowed men to relax, to hope that crises might be avoided, to enjoy the bountiful fortunes they had already made.”
– Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: The Free Press, 1963), p. 285.
“Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”
– Gabriel Kolko, ibid., p. 5.
Gabriel Kolko, a New Left historian who popularized the term political capitalism, and documented the role of business in initiating and furthering government intervention in the free-market economy, died this week at age 81.
I have mixed feelings about Kolko (1932–2014) as a scholar. (I never personally met him.) I grew up taking his work at face value, following my intellectual mentor Murray Rothbard.…
“The distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources is tenuous and perhaps in the last analysis untenable.”
– M. A. Adelman, The Economics of Petroleum Supply (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 66.
M. A. Adelman, profiled yesterday, was an empirically driven energy economist. He was not a Malthusian because the data suggested otherwise. He found with petroleum what Julian Simon found in the the family of mineral resources.
Adelman’s writings richly describe the way to understand the paradox of expanding depletable resources. He emphasized that oil was a fungible, global commodity, and improving knowledge can overcome diminishing returns in different regions and certainly globally.
And Adelman captured a point that Alex Epstein today stresses: that oil is not a ‘natural resource’ but a man-made one, from finding the treasure in the ground to refining the raw material into useful human products to transporting the inputs to delivering the outputs to points of human consumption.…
“Diminishing returns are opposed by increasing knowledge, both of the earth’s crust and of methods of extraction and use. The price of oil, like that of any mineral, is the uncertain fluctuating result of the conflict.”
– M. A. Adelman, quoted in Michael Lynch, “Morris A. Adelman, Petroleum Economist, Has Passed Away,” Forbes, May 9, 2014.
A giant of petroleum economics, MIT economist Morry Adelman, died last week at the age of 96. (A short mention in the Boston Globe is here.)
Unlike the Malthusians and peak-oilers in particular, Adelman kept his eye on marginal costs and institutions (resource ownership, government policy) to understand that oil was not a fixed, depleting asset but, at least potentially, a super-abundant, expanding one. To grow and thrive, petroleum needed market incentives just like plants need water to grow and thrive.…