In Memoriam, Thomas Roger DeGregori (1935–2025)
Tom DeGregori, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Houston whose work has been discussed on a few occasions on this blog, passed away a few days ago. Thousands of people knew him better than me (we only met twice), but he became an occasional correspondent nearly three decades ago after I had serendipitously come across his work on technological change on the bookshelves of the Université de Montréal while researching my doctoral dissertation.
I was hooked and tried to get my hands on anything he had published in defense of human creativity and material progress, including modern agriculture. At first my readings were limited to his articles in the Journal of Economic Issues and other academic outlets then available at my alma mater. But in the early 2000s he published a string of books and more accessible pieces which, somewhat uncharacteristically for someone of his generation, he made freely available through his personal website.
While he knew some of his work was mandatory readings for my undergraduate students from 2003 onward, I don’t remember if I told him they numbered in the thousands, and quite a few were appreciative once they had recovered from the initial shock.
An Institutionalist
Tom got his degrees from the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas at a time when both schools still had significant remnants of (old) American Institutionalism. Like most undergraduates of my generation, I had read some John Kenneth Galbraith, but I wasn’t aware of his intellectual lineage. It was through Tom’s books and (to me) enjoyable harangues against the younger generations of anti-technology Institutionalists that I became aware of the work of Erich Zimmermann and Clarence Ayres on resource creation.
In this though, Institutionalists were very much in line with other past Progressive thinkers, a legacy now conveniently forgotten or ignored by most younger academics with an interest in sustainable development.
University of Houston
Tom ended up teaching for over five decades at the University of Houston and finally decided to retire so that his department would not have to cut two assistant professor positions. To my knowledge (which in the last decade was derived mostly from his Facebook posts), he remained a man of the Left until the end, so he could never quite reconcile himself with the benefits of free markets. Unlike some of his pro-development Institutionalist brethren though, he never displayed much vitriol against Julian Simon and was willing to engage with people affiliated with this website.
To borrow from the title of another biography, I do not know if he was the Last Knight of Institutionalist Resourceship, but he was certainly among the contenders.
Rest in Peace Tom. Your work meant a lot to me and to many of my students.
I remember walking the halls at the University of Houston with Tom DeGregori and Pierre Desrochers. Here was a Leftie (DeGregori) who liked Julian Simon. And here was a prolific scholar who introduced me to the resource contributions of the Institutional school of economics, a tradition of thought that is congruent to Austrian school (aka market process or realistic economics). [1] And, specifically, to the functional theory of resources set forth by Erich Zimmermann.
I have been associated with resurrecting the concept of resourceship. That term, which belongs in the energy lexicon, belongs to Stephen McDonald, who, like Zimmermann, was a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. [2] But kudos to DeGregori and to Desrochers, for setting me up for success against the fixity/depletion school!
As noted in the obituary, DeGregori was a machine of reading, writing, and scholarship. He could speak incessantly on the topic of interest, which disinvited him from lunches with some of the colleagues at the University of Houston, one lunch being with Julian Simon himself.
DeGregori was generous, accepting my invitation to speak at a social gathering at a local country club after my address to my financial supporters. (Joseph Pratt, another UH professor, was gracious in the same way.)
DeGregori, to my frustration, was an unreconstructed Progressive Leftist. He was sharp until his final days (at age 90) as evidenced by our fiery exchanges on DOGE and other Trump issues. On climate change, for example, he recited the IPCC orthodoxy with documentation–as if the ‘consensus’ was right. To DeGregori, the State was a force for good in the economy, just as it was for equal rights. “I was born a liberal,” he commented in one Facebook post.
His name and work should be remembered in history regarding the debate over human betterment. He was largely correct, after all.
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[1] Zimmerman defines Institutionalism in relation to energy as follows: “Laws, political attitudes, and government policies, along with basic geological and geographical facts, become the strategic factors in determining which oil fields will be converted by foreign capital from useless ‘neutral stuff’ into the most coveted resource of modern times.” Erich W. Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries: A Functional Appraisal of the Availability of Agricultural and Industrial Resources. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951, p. 16.
[2] McDonald, Stephen. “Erich W. Zimmermann: The Dynamics of Resourceship.” In Economic Mavericks: The Texas Institutionalists, ed. Ronnie Phillips. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1995) 151-83.
“I argue that life in general and human life in particular has not survived by living within limits but by devising means of transcending them. Technologies that allow us to live within limits lead to stagnation and inevitable decline. The sustainable economy is one that continually evolves in the use of science and technology to create new resources.”
– Thomas R. DeGregori (1985) “Technological Limits to Forecasts of Doom: Science, technology, and the sustainable economy.” Technovation, 3: 3, 209-220, p. 209 https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-4972(85)90015-X
“It is only the Zimmermann-Ayres thesis of technology creating resources (more “progressivism”) that not only provides a theoretical explanation, but also lays the foundation for policies of sustainable development through resource creation. And may I add that the prescription that was offered by those arguing for the soon-to-be exhausted-resources position was to shift from non-renewable to renewable resources. More than two decades later, there is not even a hint of non-renewable resource exhaustion, but by all accounts renewable biological resources are threatened. The policy prescriptions of the 1970s would not only have made people poorer, but it would have worsened the environmental problems that we face today.”
Thomas R. DeGregori (1998) “Technological Progressivism: Guilty as Charged”. Journal of Economic Issues, 32:3, 848-856, p. 854 https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1998.11506084
““If resources are not fixed but created, then the nature of the scarcity problem changes dramatically. For the technological means involved in the use of resources determines their creation and therefore the extent of their scarcity. The nature of the scarcity is not outside the process (that is natural), but a condition of it.”
DeGregori (1987). “Resources Are Not; They Become: An Institutional Theory.” Journal of Economic Issues, p. 1258.
“Technology as ideas and as the creator of resources is not only correct, it is also liberating. It provides a conceptual basis for understanding the fact that the resource base of civilization has expanded, not contracted, with use. It gives us the kind of operational understanding necessary to frame the policies to sustain this resource-creating process. It provides a reasonable basis for optimism that the human endeavor can continue and can expand. It is, finally, the key component of a structure that challenges traditional ways of thought about the economy and opens new possibilities for creative inquiry and dialogue.” – DeGregori [1987: ibid] at 1258.
“We will exhaust resources if we exhaust creative imagination.” – DeGregori [1987: ibid] at 1260.