Chapter 13

INVESTMENT

A tourist in New York’s Greenwich Village decided to have his portrait sketched by a sidewalk artist. He received a very fine sketch, for which he was charged $100.

“That’s expensive,” he said to the artist, “but I’ll pay it, because it is a great sketch. But, really, it took you only five minutes.”

“Twenty years and five minutes,” the artist replied.

 

Artistic ability is only one of many things which are accumulated over time for use later on. Some people may think of investment as simply a transaction with money. But, more broadly and more fundamentally, it is the sacrificing of real things today in order to have more real things in the future.

In the case of the Greenwich Village artist, it was time that was invested for two decades, in order to develop the skills that allow a striking sketch to be made in five minutes. For society as a whole, investment is more likely to take the form of foregoing the production of some consumer goods today so that the labor and capital that would have been used to produce those consumer goods will be used instead to produce machinery and factories that will cause future production to be greater than it would be otherwise. The accompanying financial transactions may be what the attention of individual investors are focused on but here, as elsewhere, for society as a whole money is just an artificial device to facilitate real things that constitute real wealth.

Because the future cannot be known in advance, investments necessarily involve risks, as well as the tangible things that are invested. These risks must be compensated if investments are to continue. The cost of keeping people alive while waiting for their artistic talent to develop, their oil explorations to finally find places where oil wells can be drilled, or their academic credits to eventually add up to enough to earn their degrees, are all investments that must be repaid if such investments are to continue to be made.

The repaying of investments is not a matter of morality, but of economics. If the return on the investment is not enough to make it worthwhile, fewer people will make that particular investment in the future, and future consumers will therefore be denied the use of the goods and services that would otherwise have been produced.

No one is under any obligation to make all investments pay off, but how many need to pay off, and to what extent, is determined by how many consumers value the benefits of other people’s investments, and to what extent.

Where the consumers do not value what is being produced, the investment should not pay off. When people insist on specializing in a field for which there is little demand, their investment has been a waste of scarce resources that could have produced something else that others wanted. The low pay and sparse employment opportunities in that field are a compelling signal to them—and to others coming after them—to stop making such investments.

The principles of investment are involved in activities that do not pass through the marketplace, and are not normally thought of as economic. Putting things away after you use them is an investment of time in the present to reduce the time required to find them in the future. Explaining yourself to others can be a time-consuming, and even unpleasant, activity but it is engaged in as an investment to prevent greater unhappiness in the future from avoidable misunderstandings.

KINDS OF INVESTMENTS

Investments take many forms, whether the investment is in human beings, steel mills, or transmission lines for electricity. Risk is an inseparable part of these investments and others. Among the ways of dealing with risk are speculation, insurance and the issuance of stocks and bonds.

Human Capital

While human capital can take many forms, there is a tendency of some to equate it with formal education. However, not only may many other valuable forms of human capital be overlooked this way, the value of formal schooling may be exaggerated and its counterproductive consequences in some cases not understood.

The industrial revolution was not created by highly educated people but by people with practical industrial experience. The airplane was invented by a couple of bicycle mechanics who had never gone to college. Electricity and many inventions run by electricity became central parts of the modern world because of a man with only three months of formal schooling, Thomas Edison. Yet all these people had enormously valuable knowledge and insights—human capital—acquired from experience rather than in classrooms.

Education has of course also made major contributions to economic development and rising standards of living. But this is not to say that all kinds of education have. From an economic standpoint, some education has great value, some has no value and some can even have a negative value. While it is easy to understand the great value of specific skills in medical science or engineering, for example, or the more general foundation for a number of professions provided by mathematics, other subjects such as literature make no pretense of producing marketable skills but are available for whatever they may contribute in other ways.

In a country where education or higher levels of education are new or rare, those who have obtained diplomas or degrees may feel that many kinds of work are now beneath them. In such societies, even engineers may prefer sitting at a desk to standing in the mud in hip boots at a construction site. Depending on what they have studied, the newly educated may have higher levels of expectations than they have higher levels of ability to create the wealth from which their expectations can be met.

In the Third World especially, those who are the first members of their families to reach higher education typically do not study difficult and demanding subjects like science, medicine, or engineering, but instead tend toward easier and fuzzier subjects which provide them with little in the way of marketable skills—which is to say, skills that can create prosperity for themselves or their country.

Large numbers of young people with schooling, but without economically meaningful skills, have produced much unemployment in Third World nations. Since the marketplace has little to offer such people that would be commensurate with their expectations, governments have created swollen bureaucracies to hire them, in order to neutralize their potential for political disaffection, civil unrest or insurrection. In turn, these bureaucracies and the voluminous and time-consuming red tape they generate can become obstacles to others who do have the skills and entrepreneurship needed to contribute to the country’s economic advancement.

In India, for example, two of its leading entrepreneurial families, the Tatas and the Birlas, have been repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to obtain the necessary government permission to expand their enterprises:

 

The Tatas made 119 proposals between 1960 and 1989 to start new businesses or expand old ones, and all of them ended in the wastebaskets of the bureaucrats. Aditya Birla, the young and dynamic inheritor of the Birla empire, who had trained at MIT, was so disillusioned with Indian policy that he decided to expand Birla enterprises outside India, and eventually set up dynamic companies in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, away from the hostile atmosphere of his home.{431}

 

The vast array of government rules in India, micro-managing businesses, “ensured that every businessman would break some law or the other every month,” according to an Indian executive.{432} Large businesses in India set up their own bureaucracies in Delhi, parallel to those of the government, in order to try to keep track of the progress of their applications for the innumerable government permissions required to do things that businesses do on their own in free market economies, and to pay bribes as necessary to secure these permissions.{433}

The consequences of suffocating bureaucratic controls in India have been shown not only by such experiences while they were in full force but also by the country’s dramatic economic improvements after many of these controls were relaxed or eliminated. The Indian economy’s growth rate increased dramatically after reforms in 1991 freed many of its entrepreneurs from some of the worst controls, and foreign investment in India rose from $150 million to $3 billion{434}—in other words, by twenty times.

Hostility to entrepreneurial minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia or the Lebanese in West Africa has been especially fierce among the newly educated indigenous people, who see their own diplomas and degrees bringing them much less economic reward than the earnings of minority business owners who may have less formal schooling than themselves.

In short, more schooling is not automatically more human capital. It can in some cases reduce a country’s ability to use the human capital that it already possesses. Moreover, to the extent that some social groups specialize in different kinds of education, or have different levels of performance as students, or attend educational institutions of differing quality, the same number of years of schooling does not mean the same education in any economically meaningful sense. Such qualitative differences have in fact been common in countries around the world, whether comparing the Chinese and the Malays in Malaysia, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in Israel, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka or comparing various ethnic groups with one another in the United States.{435}

Financial Investments

When millions of people invest money, what they are doing more fundamentally is foregoing the use of current goods and services, which they have the money to buy, in hopes that they will receive back more money in the future—which is to say, that they may be able to receive a larger quantity of goods and services in the future. From the standpoint of the economy as a whole, investments mean that many resources that would otherwise have gone into producing current consumer goods like clothing, furniture, or pizzas will instead go into producing factories, ships or hydroelectric dams  that will provide future goods and services. Money totals give us some idea of the magnitude of investments but the investments themselves are ultimately additions to the real capital of the country, whether physical capital or human capital.

Investments may be made directly by individuals who buy corporate stock, for example, supplying corporations with money now in exchange for a share of the additional future value that these corporations are expected to add by using the money productively.

Much investment, however, is by institutions such as banks, insurance companies, and pension funds. Financial institutions around the world owned a total of $60 trillion in investments in 2009, of which American institutions owned 45 percent.{436}

The staggering sums of money owned by various investment institutions are often a result of aggregating individually modest sums of money from millions of people, such as stockholders in giant corporations, depositors in savings banks or workers who pay modest but regular amounts into pension funds. What this means is that vastly larger numbers of people are owners of giant corporations than those who are direct individual purchasers of corporate stock, as distinguished from those whose money makes its way into corporations through some financial intermediary. By the late twentieth century, just over half the American population owned stock, either directly or through their pension funds, bank accounts or other financial intermediaries.{437}

Financial institutions allow vast numbers of individuals who cannot possibly all know each other personally to nevertheless use one another’s money by going through some intermediary institution which assumes the responsibility of assessing risks, taking precautions to reduce those risks, and making transfers through loans to individuals or institutions, or by making investments in businesses, real estate or other ventures.

Financial intermediaries not only allow the pooling of money from innumerable individuals to finance huge economic undertakings by businesses, they also allow individuals to redistribute their own individual consumption over time. Borrowers in effect draw on future income to pay for current purchases, paying interest for the convenience. Conversely, savers postpone purchases till a later time, receiving interest for the delay.

Everything depends on the changing circumstances of each individual’s life, with many—if not most—people being both debtors and creditors at different stages of their lives. People who are middle-aged, for example, tend to save more than young people, not only because their incomes are higher but also because of a need to prepare financially for retirement in the years ahead and for the higher medical expenses that old age can be expected to bring. In the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, and Japan, the highest rates of saving have been in the 55 to 59 year old bracket and the lowest in the under 30 year old bracket—the whole under 30 cohort having zero net savings in Canada and negative net savings in the United States.{438} While those who are saving may not think of themselves as creditors, the money that they put into banks is then lent out by those banks, acting as intermediaries between those who are saving and those who are borrowing.

What makes such activities something more than matters of personal finance is that these financial transactions are for the economy as a whole another way of allocating scarce resources which have alternative uses—allocating them over time, as well as among individuals and enterprises at a given time. To build a factory, a railroad, or a hydroelectric dam requires that labor, natural resources, and other factors of production that would otherwise go into producing consumer goods in the present be diverted to creating something that may take years before it begins to produce any output that can be used in the future.

In short, from the standpoint of society as a whole, present goods and services are sacrificed for the sake of future goods and services. Only where those future goods and services are more valuable than the present goods and services that are being sacrificed will financial institutions be able to receive a rate of return on their investments that will allow them to offer a high enough rate of return to innumerable individuals to induce those individuals to sacrifice their current consumption by supplying the savings required.

With financial intermediaries as with other economic institutions, nothing shows their function more clearly than seeing what happens when they are not able to function. A society without well-functioning financial institutions has fewer opportunities to generate greater wealth over time. Poor countries may remain poor, despite having an abundance of natural resources, when they have not yet developed the complex financial institutions required to mobilize the scattered savings of innumerable individuals, so as to be able to make the large investments required to turn natural resources into usable output. Sometimes foreign investors from countries which do have such institutions are the only ones able to come in to perform this function. At other times, however, there is not the legal framework of dependable laws and secure property rights required for either domestic or foreign investors to function.

Financial institutions not only transfer resources from one set of consumers to another and transfer resources from one use to another, they also create wealth by joining the entrepreneurial talents of people who lack money to the savings of many others, in order to finance new firms and new industries. Many, if not most, great American industries and individual fortunes began with entrepreneurs who had very limited financial resources at the outset. The Hewlett-Packard Corporation, for example, began as a business in a garage rented with borrowed money, and many other famous entrepreneurs—Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie, for example—had similarly modest beginnings. That these individuals and the enterprises they founded later became wealthy was an incidental by-product of the fact that they created vast amounts of wealth for the country as a whole. But the ability of poorer societies to follow similar paths is thwarted when they lack the financial institutions to allocate resources to those with great entrepreneurial ability but little or no money.

Such institutions took centuries to develop in the West. Nineteenth-century London was the greatest financial capital in the world, but there were earlier centuries when the British were so little versed in the complexities of finance that they were dependent on foreigners to run their financial institutions—notably Lombards and Jews. That is why there is a Lombard Street in London’s financial district today and another street there named Old Jewry. Not only some Third World countries, but also some countries in the former Communist bloc of nations in Eastern Europe, have yet to develop the kinds of sophisticated financial institutions which promote economic development. They may now have capitalism, but they have not yet developed the financial institutions that would mobilize capital on a scale found in Western European countries and their overseas offshoots, such as the United States.

It is not that the wealth is not there in less developed economies. The problem is that their wealth cannot be collected from innumerable small sources, concentrated, and then allocated in large amounts to particular entrepreneurs, without financial institutions equal to the complex task of evaluating risks, markets, and rates of return.

In recent years, American banks and banks from Western Europe have gone into Eastern Europe to fill the vacuum. As of 2005, 70 percent of the assets in Poland’s banking system were controlled by foreign banks, as were more than 80 percent of the banking assets in Bulgaria. Still, these countries lagged behind other Western nations in the use of such things as credit cards or even bank accounts. Only one-third of Poles had a bank account and only two percent of purchases in Poland were made with credit cards.{439}

The complexity of financial institutions means that relatively few people are likely to understand them—which makes them vulnerable politically to critics who can depict their activities as sinister. Where those who have the expertise to operate such institutions are either foreigners or domestic minorities, they are especially vulnerable. Money-lenders have seldom been popular and terms like “Shylock” or even “speculator” are not terms of endearment. Many unthinking people in many countries and many periods of history have regarded financial activities as not “really” contributing anything to the economy, and have regarded the people who engage in such financial activities as mere parasites.

This was especially so at a time when most people engaged in hard physical labor in agriculture or industry, and were both suspicious and resentful of people who simply sat around handling pieces of paper, while producing nothing that could be seen or felt. Centuries-old hostilities have arisen—and have been acted upon—against minority groups who played such roles, whether they were Jews in Europe, overseas Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia, or Chettiars in their native India or in Burma, East Africa, or Fiji. Often such groups have been expelled or harassed into leaving the country—sometimes by mob violence—because of popular beliefs that they were parasitic.

Those with such misconceptions have then often been surprised to discover economic activity and the standard of living declining in the wake of their departure. An understanding of basic economics could have prevented many human tragedies, as well as many economic inefficiencies.

RETURNS ON INVESTMENT

Delayed rewards for costs incurred earlier are a return on investment, whether these rewards take the form of dividends paid on corporate stock or increases in incomes resulting from having gone to college or medical school. One of the largest investments in many people’s lives consists of the time and energy expended over a period of years in raising their children. At one time, the return on that investment included having the children take care of the parents in old age, but today the return on this investment often consists only of the parents’ satisfaction in seeing their children’s well-being and progress. From the standpoint of society as a whole, each generation that makes this investment in its offspring is repaying the investment that was made by the previous generation in raising those who are parents today.

“Unearned Income”

Although making investments and receiving the delayed return on those investments takes many forms and has been going on all over the world throughout the history of the human race, misunderstandings of this process have also been long standing and widespread. Sometimes these delayed benefits are called “unearned” income, simply because they do not represent rewards for contributions made during the current time period. Investments that build a factory may not be repaid until years later, after workers and managers have been hired and products manufactured and sold.

During the particular year when dividends finally begin to be paid, investors may not have contributed anything, but this does not mean that the reward they receive is “unearned,” simply because it was not earned by an investment made during that particular year.

What can be seen physically is always more vivid than what cannot be seen. Those who watch a factory in operation can see the workers creating a product before their eyes. They cannot see the investment which made that factory possible in the first place. Risks are invisible, even when they are present risks, and the past risks surrounding the initial creation of the business are readily forgotten by observers who see only a successful enterprise after the fact.

Also easily overlooked are the many management decisions that had to be made in determining where to locate, what kind of equipment to acquire, and what policies to follow in dealing with suppliers, consumers, and employees—any one of which decisions could spell the difference between success and failure. And of course what also cannot be seen are all the similar businesses that went out of business because they did not do all the things done by the surviving business we see before our eyes, or did not do them equally well.

It is easy to regard the visible factors as the sole or most important factors, even when other businesses with those same visible factors went bankrupt, while an expertly managed enterprise in the same industry flourished and grew. Nor are such misunderstandings inconsequential, either economically or politically. Many laws and government economic policies have been based on these misunderstandings. Elaborate ideologies and mass movements have also been based on the notion that only the workers “really” create wealth, while others merely skim off profits, without having contributed anything to producing the wealth in which they unjustly share.

Such misconceptions have had fateful consequences for money-lenders around the world. For many centuries, money-lenders have been widely condemned in many cultures for receiving back more money than they lent—that is, for getting an “unearned” income for waiting for payment and for taking risks. Often the social stigma attached to money-lending has been so great that only minorities who lived outside the existing social system anyway have been willing to take on such stigmatized activities. Thus, for centuries, Jews predominated in such occupations in Europe, as the Chinese did in Southeast Asia, the Chettiars and Marwaris in India, and other minority groups in other parts of the world.

Misconceptions about money-lending often take the form of laws attempting to help borrowers by giving them more leeway in repaying loans. But anything that makes it difficult to collect a debt when it is due makes it less likely that loans will be made in the first place, or will be made at the lower interest rates that would prevail in the absence of such debtor-protection policies by governments.

In some societies, people are not expected to charge interest on loans to relatives or fellow members of the local community, nor to be insistent on prompt payment according to the letter of the loan agreement. These kinds of preconditions discourage loans from being made in the first place, and sometimes they discourage individuals from letting it be known that they have enough money to be able to lend. In societies where such social pressures are particularly strong, incentives for acquiring wealth are reduced. This is not only a loss to the individual who might otherwise have made wealth by going all out, it is a loss to the whole society when people who are capable of producing things that many others are willing to pay for may not choose to go all out in doing so.

Investment and Allocation

Interest, as the price paid for investment funds, plays the same allocational role as other prices in bringing supply and demand into balance. When interest rates are low, it is more profitable to borrow money to invest in building houses or modernizing a factory or launching other economic ventures. On the other hand, low interest rates reduce the incentives to save. Higher interest rates lead more people to save more money but lead fewer investors to borrow that money when borrowing is more expensive. As with supply and demand for products in general, imbalances between supply and demand for money lead to rises or falls in the price—in this case, the interest rate. As The Economist magazine put it:

 

Most of the time, mismatches between the desired levels of saving and investment are brought into line fairly easily through the interest-rate mechanism. If people’s desire to save exceeds their desire to invest, interest rates will fall so that the incentive to save goes down and the willingness to invest goes up.{440}

 

In an unchanging world, these mismatches between savings and investment would end, and investors would invest the same amount that savers were saving, with the result that interest rates would be stable because they would have no reason to change. But, in the real world as it is, interest rate fluctuations, like price fluctuations in general, constantly redirect resources in different directions as technology, demand and other factors change. Because interest rates are symptoms of an underlying reality, and of the constraints inherent in that reality, laws or government policies that change interest rates have repercussions far beyond the purpose for which the interest rate is changed, with reverberations throughout the economy.

For example, when the U.S. Federal Reserve System in the early twenty-first century lowered interest rates, in order to try to sustain production and employment, in the face of signs that the growth of national output and employment might be slowing down, the repercussions included an increase in the prices of houses. Lower interest rates meant lower mortgage payments and therefore enabled more people to be able to afford to buy houses. This in turn led fewer people to rent apartments, so that apartment rents fell because of a reduced demand. Artificially low interest rates also provided fewer incentives for people to save. 

These were just some of many changes that spread throughout the economy, brought about by the Federal Reserve’s changes in interest rates. More generally, this showed how intricately all parts of a market economy are tied together, so that changes in one part of the system are transmitted automatically to innumerable other parts of the system.

Not everything that is called interest is in fact interest, however. When loans are made, for example, what is charged as interest includes not only the rate of return necessary to compensate for the time delay in receiving the money back, but also an additional amount to compensate for the risk that the loan will not be repaid, or repaid on time, or repaid in full. What is called interest also includes the costs of processing the loan. With small loans, especially, these process costs can become a significant part of what is charged because process costs do not vary as much as the amount of the loan varies. That is, lending a thousand dollars does not require ten times as much paperwork as lending a hundred dollars.

In other words, process costs on small loans can be a larger share of what is loosely called interest. Many of the criticisms of small financial institutions that operate in low-income neighborhoods grow out of misconstruing various charges that are called interest but are not, in the strict sense in which economists use the term for payments received for time delay in receiving repayment and the risk that the repayment will not be made in full or on time, or perhaps at all.

Short-term loans to low-income people are often called “payday loans,” since they are to be repaid on the borrower’s next payday or when a Social Security check or welfare check arrives, which may be only a matter of weeks, or even days, away. Such loans, according to the Wall Street Journal, are “usually between $300 and $400.”{441} Obviously, such loans are more likely to be made to people whose incomes and assets are so low that they need a modest sum of money immediately for some exigency and simply do not have it.

The media and politicians make much of the fact that the annual rate of interest (as they loosely use the term “interest”) on these loans is astronomical. The New York Times, for example referred to “an annualized interest rate of 312 percent”{442} on some such loans. But payday loans are not made for a year, so the annual rate of interest is irrelevant, except for creating a sensation in the media or in politics. As one owner of a payday loan business pointed out, discussing annual interest rates on payday loans is like saying salmon costs more than $15,000 a ton or a hotel room rents for more than $36,000 a year, {443}since most people never buy a ton of salmon or rent a hotel room for a year.

Whatever the costs of processing payday loans, those costs as well as the cost of risk must be recovered from the interest charged—and the shorter the period of time involved, the higher the annual interest rate must be to cover those fixed costs. For a two-week loan, payday lenders typically charge $15 in interest for every $100 lent. When laws restrict the annual interest rate to 36 percent, this means that the interest charged for a two-week loan would be less than $1.50—an amount unlikely to cover even the cost of processing the loan, much less the risk involved. When Oregon passed a law capping the annual interest rate at 36 percent, three-quarters of the hundreds of payday lenders in the state closed down.{444} Similar laws in other states have also shut down many payday lenders.{445}

So-called “consumer advocates” may celebrate such laws but the low-income borrower who cannot get the $100 urgently needed may have to pay more than $15 in late fees on a credit card bill or pay in other consequences—such as having a car repossessed or having the electricity cut off—that the borrower obviously considered more detrimental than paying $15, or the transaction would not have been made in the first place.

The lower the interest rate ceiling, the more reliable the borrowers would have to be, in order to make it pay to lend to them. At a sufficiently low interest rate ceiling, it would pay to lend only to millionaires and, at a still lower interest rate ceiling, it would pay to lend only to billionaires. Since different ethnic groups have different incomes and different average credit scores, interest rate ceilings virtually guarantee that there will be disparities in the proportions of these groups who are approved for mortgage loans, credit cards and other forms of lending.

In the United States, for example, Asian Americans have higher average credit scores than Hispanic Americans or black Americans—or white Americans, {446}for that matter. Yet people who favor interest rate ceilings are often shocked to discover that some racial or ethnic groups are turned down for mortgage loans more often than others, and attribute this to racial discrimination by the lenders. But, since most American lenders are apt to be white, and they turn down whites at a much higher rate than they turn down Asian Americans, racial discrimination seems an unlikely explanation.

Where there are lenders who specialize in large, short-term loans to high-income people with expensive possessions to use as collateral, these “collateral lenders” (essentially pawn shops for the affluent or rich) charge interest rates that can exceed 200 percent on an annual basis. These interest rates are high for the same reasons that payday loans to low-income people are high. But, because the high-income loans are secured by collateral that can be sold if the loan is not repaid, the high interest rates are not as high as with loans to low-income people without collateral. Moreover, because a collateral lender like Pawngo makes loans averaging between $10,000 to $15,000,{447} the fixed process costs are a much smaller percentage of the loans, and so add correspondingly less to the interest rate charged.

SPECULATION

Most market transactions involve buying things that exist, based on whatever value they have to the buyer and whatever price is charged by the seller. Some transactions, however, involve buying things that do not yet exist or whose value has yet to be determined—or both. For example, the price of stock in the Internet company Amazon.com rose for years before the company made its first dollar of profits. People were obviously speculating that the company would eventually make profits or that others would keep bidding up the price of its stock, so that the initial stockholder could sell the stock for a profit, whether or not Amazon.com itself ever made a profit. Amazon.com was founded in 1994. After years of operating at a loss, it finally made its first profit in 2001.

Exploring for oil is another costly speculation, since millions of dollars may be spent before discovering whether there is in fact any oil at all where the exploration is taking place, much less whether there is enough oil to repay the money spent.

Many other things are bought in hopes of future earnings which may or may not materialize—scripts for movies that may never be made, pictures painted by artists who may or may not become famous some day, and foreign currencies that may go up in value over time, but which could just as easily go down. Speculation as an economic activity may be engaged in by people in all walks of life but there are also professional speculators for whom this is their whole career.

One of the professional speculator’s main roles is in relieving other people from having to speculate as part of their regular economic activity, such as farming for example, where both the weather during the growing season and the prices at harvest time are unpredictable. Put differently, risk is inherent in all aspects of human life. Speculation is one way of having some people specialize in bearing these risks, for a price. For such transactions to take place, the cost of the risk being transferred from whoever initially bears that risk must be greater than what is charged by whoever agrees to take on the risk. At the same time, the cost to whoever takes on that risk must be less than the price charged.

In other words, the risk must be reduced by this transfer, in order for the transfer to make sense to both parties. The reason for the speculator’s lower cost may be more sophisticated methods of assessing risk, a larger amount of capital available to ride out short-run losses, or because the number and variety of the speculator’s risks lowers his over-all risk. No speculator can expect to avoid losses on particular speculations but, so long as the gains exceed the losses over time, speculation can be a viable business.

The other party to the transaction must also benefit from the net reduction of risk. When an American wheat farmer in Idaho or Nebraska is getting ready to plant his crop, he has no way of knowing what the price of wheat will be when the crop is harvested. That depends on innumerable other wheat farmers, not only in the United States but as far away as Russia or Argentina.

If the wheat crop fails in Russia or Argentina, the world price of wheat will shoot up, because of supply and demand, causing American wheat farmers to get very high prices for their crop. But if there are bumper crops of wheat in Russia and Argentina, there may be more wheat on the world market than anybody can use, with the excess having to go into expensive storage facilities. That will cause the world price of wheat to plummet, so that the American farmer may have little to show for all his work, and may be lucky to avoid taking a loss on the year. Meanwhile, he and his family will have to live on their savings or borrow from whatever sources will lend to them.

In order to avoid having to speculate like this, the farmer may in effect pay a professional speculator to carry the risk, while the farmer sticks to farming. The speculator signs contracts to buy or sell at prices fixed in advance for goods to be delivered at some future date. This shifts the risk of the activity from the person engaging in it—such as the wheat farmer, in this case—to someone who is, in effect, betting that he can guess the future prices better than the other person and has the financial resources to ride out the inevitable wrong bets, in order to make a net profit over all because of the bets that turn out better.

Speculation is often misunderstood as being the same as gambling, when in fact it is the opposite of gambling. What gambling involves, whether in games of chance or in actions like playing Russian roulette, is creating a risk that would otherwise not exist, in order either to profit or to exhibit one’s skill or lack of fear. What economic speculation involves is coping with an inherent risk in such a way as to minimize it and to leave it to be borne by whoever is best equipped to bear it.

When a commodity speculator offers to buy wheat that has not yet been planted, that makes it easier for a farmer to plant wheat, without having to wonder what the market price will be like later, at harvest time. A futures contract guarantees the seller a specified price in advance, regardless of what the market price may turn out to be at the time of delivery. This separates farming from economic speculation, allowing each to be done by different people, who specialize in different economic activities. The speculator uses his knowledge of the market, and of economic and statistical analysis, to try to arrive at a better guess than the farmer may be able to make, and thus is able to offer a price that the farmer will consider an attractive alternative to waiting to sell at whatever price happens to prevail in the market at harvest time.

Although speculators seldom make a profit on every transaction, they must come out ahead in the long run, in order to stay in business. Their profit depends on paying the farmer a price that is lower on average than the price which actually emerges at harvest time. The farmer also knows this, of course. In effect, the farmer is paying the speculator for carrying the risk, just as one pays an insurance company. As with other goods and services, the question may be raised as to whether the service rendered is worth the price charged. At the individual level, each farmer can decide for himself whether the deal is worth it. Each speculator must of course bid against other speculators, as each farmer must compete with other farmers, whether in making futures contracts or in selling at harvest time.

From the standpoint of the economy as a whole, competition determines what the price will be and therefore what the speculator’s profit will be. If that profit exceeds what it takes to entice investors to risk their money in this volatile field, more investments will flow into this segment of the market until competition drives profits down to a level that just compensates the expenses, efforts, and risks.

Competition is visibly frantic among speculators who shout out their offers and bids in commodity exchanges. Prices fluctuate from moment to moment and a five-minute delay in making a deal can mean the difference between profits and losses. Even a modest-sized firm engaging in commodity speculation can gain or lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single day, and huge corporations can gain or lose millions in a few hours.

Commodity markets are not just for big businesses or even for farmers in technologically advanced countries. A New York Times dispatch from India reported:

 

At least once a day in this village of 2,500 people, Ravi Sham Choudhry turns on the computer in his front room and logs in to the Web site of the Chicago Board of Trade.

He has the dirt of a farmer under his fingernails and pecks slowly at the keys. But he knows what he wants: the prices for soybean commodity futures.{448}

 

This was not an isolated case. As of 2003, there were 3,000 organizations in India putting as many as 1.8 million Indian farmers in touch with the world’s commodity markets. The farmer just mentioned served as an agent for fellow farmers in surrounding villages. As one sign of how fast such Internet commodity information is spreading, Mr. Choudhry earned $300 the previous year from this activity that is incidental to his farming, but now earned that much in one month.{449} That is a very significant sum in a poor country like India.

Agricultural commodities are not the only ones in which commodity traders speculate. One of the most dramatic examples of what can happen with commodity speculation involved the rise and fall of silver prices in 1980. Silver was selling at $6.00 an ounce in early 1979 but skyrocketed to a high of $50.05 an ounce by early 1980. However, this price began a decline that reached $21.62 on March 26th. Then, in just one day, that price was cut by more than half to $10.80. In the process, the billionaire Hunt brothers, who were speculating heavily in silver, lost more than a billion dollars within a few weeks.{450} Speculation is one of the financially riskiest activities for the individual speculator, though it reduces risks for the economy as a whole.

Speculation may be engaged in by people who are not normally thought of as speculators. As far back as the 1870s, a food-processing company headed by Henry Heinz signed contracts to buy cucumbers from farmers at pre-arranged prices, regardless of what the market prices might be when the cucumbers were harvested. Then as now, those farmers who did not sign futures contracts with anyone were necessarily engaging in speculation about prices at harvest time, whether or not they thought of themselves as speculators. Incidentally, the deal proved to be disastrous for Heinz when there was a bumper crop of cucumbers, well beyond what he expected or could afford to buy, forcing him into bankruptcy.{451} It took him years to recover financially and start over, eventually founding the H.J. Heinz company that continues to exist today.

Because risk is the whole reason for speculation in the first place, being wrong is a common experience, though being wrong too often means facing financial extinction. Predictions, even by very knowledgeable people, can be wrong by vast amounts. The distinguished British magazine The Economist predicted in March 1999 that the price of a barrel of oil was heading down, {452}when in fact it headed up—and by December oil was selling for five times the price suggested by The Economist. In the United States, predictions about inflation by the Federal Reserve System have more than once turned out to be wrong, and the Congressional Budget Office has likewise predicted that a new tax law would bring in more tax revenue, when in fact tax revenues fell instead of rising, and in other cases the CBO predicted falling revenues from a new tax law, when in fact revenues rose.

Futures contracts are made for delivery of gold, oil, soybeans, foreign currencies and many other things at some price fixed in advance for delivery on a future date. Commodity speculation is only one kind of speculation. People also speculate in real estate, corporate stocks, or other things.

The full cost of risk is not only the amount of money involved, it is also the worry that hangs over the individual while waiting to see what happens. A farmer may expect to get $1,000 a ton for his crop but also knows that it could turn out to be $500 a ton or $1,500. If a speculator offers to guarantee to buy his crop at $900 a ton, that price may look good if it spares the farmer months of sleepless nights wondering how he is going to support his family if the harvest price leaves him too little to cover his costs of growing the crop.

Not only may the speculator be better equipped financially to deal with being wrong, he may be better equipped psychologically, since the kind of people who worry a lot do not usually go into commodity speculation. A commodity speculator I knew had one year when his business was operating at a loss going into December, but things changed so much in December that he still ended up with a profit for the year—to his surprise, as much as anyone else’s. This is not an occupation for the faint of heart.

Economic speculation is another way of allocating scarce resources—in this case, knowledge. Neither the speculator nor the farmer knows what the prices will be when the crop is harvested. But the speculator happens to have more knowledge of markets and of economic and statistical analysis than the farmer, just as the farmer has more knowledge of how to grow the crop. My commodity speculator friend admitted that he had never actually seen a soybean and had no idea what they looked like, even though he had probably bought and sold millions of dollars’ worth of soybeans over the years. He simply transferred ownership of his soybeans on paper to soybean buyers at harvest time, without ever taking physical possession of them from the farmer. He was not really in the soybean business, he was in the risk management business.

INVENTORIES

Inherent risks must be dealt with by the economy not only through economic speculation but also by maintaining inventories. Put differently, inventory is a substitute for knowledge. No food would ever be thrown out after a meal, if the cook knew beforehand exactly how much each person would eat and could therefore cook just that amount. Since inventory costs money, a business enterprise must try to limit how much inventory it has on hand, while at the same time not risking running out of their product and thereby missing sales.

Japanese automakers are famous for carrying so little inventory that parts for their automobiles arrive at the factory several times a day, to be put on the cars as they move down the assembly line. This reduces the costs of carrying a large inventory of parts and thereby reduces the cost of producing a car. However, an earthquake in Japan in 2007 put one of its piston-ring suppliers out of commission. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

 

For want of a piston ring costing $1.50, nearly 70% of Japan’s auto production has been temporarily paralyzed this week.{453}

 

Having either too large or too small an inventory means losing money. Clearly, those businesses which come closest to the optimal size of inventory will have their profit prospects enhanced. More important, the total resources of the economy will be allocated more efficiently, not only because each enterprise has an incentive to be efficient, but also because those firms which turn out to be right more often are more likely to survive and continue making such decisions, while those who repeatedly carry far too large an inventory, or far too small, are likely to disappear from the market through bankruptcy.

Too large an inventory means excess costs of doing business, compared to the costs of their competitors, who are therefore in a position to sell at lower prices and take away customers. Too small an inventory means running out of what the customers want, not only missing out on immediate sales but also risking having those customers look elsewhere for more dependable suppliers in the future. As noted in Chapter 6, in an economy where deliveries of goods and parts were always uncertain, such as that of the Soviet Union, huge inventories were the norm.

Some of the same economic principles involving risk apply to activities far removed from the marketplace. A soldier going into battle does not take just the number of bullets he will fire or just the amount of first aid supplies he will need if wounded in a particular way, because neither he nor anyone else has the kind of foresight required to do that. The soldier carries an inventory of both ammunition and medical supplies to cover various contingencies. At the same time, he cannot go into battle loaded down with huge amounts of everything that he might possibly need in every conceivable circumstance. That would slow him down and reduce his maneuverability, making him an easier target for the enemy. In other words, beyond some point, attempts to increase his safety can make his situation more dangerous.

Inventory is related to knowledge and risk in another way. In normal times, each business tends to keep a certain ratio of inventory to its sales. However, when times are more uncertain, such as during a recession or depression, sales may be made from existing inventories without producing replacements. During the third quarter of 2003, for example, as the United States was recovering from a recession, its sales, exports, and profits were all rising, but BusinessWeek magazine reported that manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers were “selling goods off their shelves” and “the ratio of inventories to sales hit a record low.”{454}

The net result was that far fewer jobs were created than in similar periods of increased business activity in the past, leading to the phrase “a jobless recovery” to describe what was happening, as businesses were not confident that this recovery would last. In short, for sellers the selling of inventory was a way of coping with economic risks. Only after inventories had hit bottom did the hiring of more people to produce more goods increase on such a large scale as to make the phrase “a jobless recovery” no longer applicable.

PRESENT VALUE

Although many goods and services are bought for immediate use, many other benefits come in a stream over time, whether as a season’s ticket to baseball games or an annuity that will make monthly pension payments to you after you retire. That whole stream of benefits may be purchased at a given moment for what economists call its “present value”—that is, the price of a season’s ticket or the price paid for an annuity. However, more is involved than simply determining the price to be paid, important as that is. The implications of present value affect economic decisions and their consequences, even in areas that are not normally thought of as economic, such as determining the amount of natural resources available for future generations.

Prices and Present Values

Whether a home, business, or farm is maintained, repaired or improved today determines how long it will last and how well it will operate in the future. However, the owner who has paid for repairs and maintenance does not have to wait to see the future effects on the property’s value. These future benefits are immediately reflected in the property’s present value. The “present value” of an asset is in fact nothing more than its anticipated future benefits, added up and discounted for the fact that they are delayed. Your home, business, or farm may be functioning no better than your neighbor’s today, but if the prospective toll of wear and tear on your property over time is reduced by installing heavier pipes, stronger woods, or other more durable building materials, then your property’s market value will immediately be worth more than that of your neighbor, even if there is no visible difference in the way they are functioning today.

Conversely, if the city announces that it is going to begin building a sewage treatment plant next year, on a piece of land next to your home, the value of your home will decline immediately, before the adjoining land has been touched. The present value of an asset reflects its future benefits or detriments, so that anything which is expected to enhance or reduce those benefits or detriments will immediately affect the price at which the asset can be sold today.

Present value links the future to the present in many ways. It makes sense for a ninety-year-old man to begin planting fruit trees that will take 20 years before they reach their maturity because his land will immediately be worth more as a result of those trees. He can sell the land a month later and go live in the Bahamas if he wishes, because he will be receiving additional value from the fruit that is expected to grow on those trees, years after he is no longer alive. Part of the value of his wealth today consists of the value of food that has not yet been grown—and which will be eaten by children who have not yet been born.

One of the big differences between economics and politics is that politicians are not forced to pay attention to future consequences that lie beyond the next election. An elected official whose policies keep the public happy up through election day stands a good chance of being voted another term in office, even if those policies will have ruinous consequences in later years. There is no “present value” to make political decision-makers today take future consequences into account, when those consequences will come after election day.

Although the general public may not have sufficient knowledge or training to realize the long-run implications of today’s policies, financial specialists who deal in government bonds do. Thus the Standard & Poor’s bond-rating service downgraded California’s state bonds in the midst of that state’s electricity crisis in 2001,{455} even though there had been no defaults on those bonds, nor any lesser payments made to those who had bought California bonds, and there were billions of dollars of surplus in the state’s treasury.

What Standard & Poor’s understood was that the heavy financial responsibilities taken on by the California government to meet the electricity crisis meant that heavy taxes or heavy debt were waiting over the horizon. That increased the risk of future defaults or delay in payments to bondholders—thereby reducing the present value of those bonds.

Any series of future payments can be reduced to a present value that can be paid immediately in a lump sum. Winners of lotteries who are paid in installments over a period of years can sell those payments to a financial institution that will give them a fixed sum immediately. So can accident victims who have been awarded installment payments from insurance companies. Because the present value of a series of payments due over a period of decades may be considerably less than the sum total of all those payments, due to discounting for delays, the lump sums paid may be less than half of those totals, {456}causing some people who sold, in order to relieve immediate financial problems, to later resent the deal they made. Others, however, are pleased and return to make similar deals in the future.

Conversely, some individuals may wish to convert a fixed sum of money into a stream of future payments. Elderly people who are retiring with what seems like an adequate amount to live on must be concerned with whether they will live longer than expected—“outlive their money” as the expression goes—and end up in poverty. In order to avoid this, they may use a portion of their money to purchase an annuity from an insurance company. For example, in the early twenty-first century, a seventy year old man could purchase an annuity for a price of $100,000 and thereafter receive $772 a month for life—whether that life was three more years or thirty more years. In other words, the risk would be transferred to the insurance company, for a price.

As in other cases, the risk is not only shifted but reduced, since the insurance company can more accurately predict the average lifespan of millions of people to whom it has sold annuities than any given individual can predict his own lifespan. Incidentally, a woman aged 70 would get somewhat smaller monthly payments—$725—for the same price, given that women usually live longer than men.{457}

The key point is that the reduced risk comes from the greater predictability of large numbers. A news story some years ago told of a speculator who made a deal with an elderly woman who needed money. In exchange for her making him the heir to her house, he agreed to pay her a fixed sum every month as long as she lived. However, this one-to-one deal did not work out as planned because she lived far longer than anyone expected and the speculator died before she did. An insurance company not only has the advantage of large numbers, it has the further advantage that its existence is not limited to the human lifespan.

Natural Resources

Present value profoundly affects the discovery and use of natural resources. There may be enough oil underground to last for centuries or millennia, but its present value determines how much oil will repay what it costs anyone to discover it at any given time—and that may be no more than enough oil to last for a dozen or so years. A failure to understand this basic economic reality has, for generations, led to numerous and widely publicized false predictions that we were “running out” of petroleum, coal, or some other natural resource.

In 1960, for example, a best-selling book said that the United States had only a 13-year supply of domestic petroleum at the existing rate of usage.{458} At that time, the known petroleum reserves of the United States were not quite 32 billion barrels. At the end of the 13 years, the known petroleum reserves of the United States were more than 36 billion barrels.{459} Yet the original statistics and the arithmetic based on them were both accurate. Why then did the United States not run out of oil by 1973? Was it just dumb luck that more oil was discovered—or were there more fundamental economic reasons?

Just as shortages and surpluses are not simply a matter of how much physical stuff there is, either absolutely or relative to the population, so known reserves of natural resources are not simply a matter of how much physical stuff there is in the ground. For natural resources as well, prices are crucial. So are present values.

How much of any given natural resource is known to exist depends on how much it costs to know. Oil exploration, for example, is very costly. In 2011, the New York Times reported:

 

Two miles below the ocean floor, on a ridge the size of metropolitan Houston, modern-day wildcatters have pinpointed what they believe is a major oil field. Now all they have to do is spend $100 million to find out if they’re right.{460}

 

The cost of producing oil includes not only the costs of geological exploration but also the costs of drilling expensive dry holes before striking oil. As these costs mount up while more and more oil is being discovered around the world, the growing abundance of known supplies of oil reduces its price through supply and demand. Eventually the point is reached where the cost per barrel of finding more oil in a given place and processing it exceeds the present value per barrel of the oil that you are likely to find there. At that point, it no longer pays to keep exploring. Depending on a number of circumstances, the total amount of oil discovered at that point may well be no more than the 13 years’ supply which led to dire predictions that we were running out. But, as the existing supplies of oil are being used up, rising prices lead to more huge investments in oil exploration.

As one example of the kinds of costs that can be involved, a major oil exploration venture in the Gulf of Mexico spent $80 million on the initial exploration and leases, and another $120 million for exploratory drilling, just to see if it looked like there was enough oil to justify continuing further. Then there were $530 million spent for building drilling platforms, pipelines, and other infrastructure, and—finally—$370 million for drilling for oil where there were proven reserves. This adds up to a total of $1.1 billion.

Imagine if the interest rate had been twice as high on this much money borrowed from banks or investors, making the total cost of exploration even higher. Or imagine that the oil companies had this much money of their own and could put it in a bank to earn twice the usual interest in safety. Would they have sunk as much money as they did into the more risky investment of looking for oil? Would you? Probably not. A higher interest rate would probably have meant less oil exploration and therefore smaller amounts of known reserves of petroleum. But that would not mean that we were any closer to running out of oil than if the interest rate were lower and the known reserves were correspondingly higher.

As more and more of the known reserves of oil get used up, the present value of each barrel of the remaining oil begins to rise and, once more, exploration for additional oil becomes profitable. But, as of any given time, it never pays to discover all the oil that exists in the ground or under the sea. In fact, it does not pay to discover more than a minute fraction of that oil. What does pay is for people to write hysterical predictions that we are running out of natural resources. It pays not only in book sales and television ratings, but also in political power and in personal notoriety.

In the early twenty-first century, a book titled Twilight in the Desert concluded that “Sooner or later, the worldwide use of oil must peak” and that is because “oil, like the other two fossil fuels, coal and natural gas, is nonrenewable.” That is certainly true in the abstract, just as it is true in the abstract that sooner or later the sun must grow cold. But that is very different from saying that this has any relevance to any problem confronting us in the next century or the next millennium. The insinuation, however, was that we faced some enduring energy crisis in our own time, and the fact that the price of crude oil had shot up to $147 a barrel, with the price of gasoline shooting up to $4 a gallon, lent credence to that insinuation. But, in 2010, the New York Times reported:

 

Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation.{461}

 

Even the huge usages of energy resources during the entire twentieth century did not reduce the known reserves of the natural resources used to generate that energy. Given the enormous drain on energy resources created historically by such things as the spread of railroad networks, factory machinery, and the electrification of cities, it has been estimated that more energy was consumed in the first two decades of the twentieth century than in all the previously recorded history of the human race.{462} Moreover, energy usage continued to escalate throughout the century—and yet known petroleum reserves rose. At the end of the twentieth century, the known reserves of petroleum were more than ten times as large as they were in the middle of the twentieth century.{463} Improvements in technology made oil discovery and its extraction more efficient. In the 1970s, only about one-sixth of all wells drilled in search of oil turned out to actually produce oil. But, by the early twenty-first century, two-thirds of these exploratory wells produced oil.{464}

The economic considerations which apply to petroleum apply to other natural resources as well. No matter how much iron ore there is in the ground, it will never pay to discover more of it when its present value per ton is less than the cost per ton of exploration and processing. Yet, despite the fact that the twentieth century saw vast expansions in the use of iron and steel, the proven reserves of iron ore increased several fold. So did the known reserves of copper, aluminum, and lead, among other natural resources.{465} As of 1945, the known reserves of copper were 100 million metric tons. After a quarter of a century of unprecedented increases in the use of copper, the known reserves of copper were three times what they were at the outset and, by 1999, copper reserves had doubled again.{466} The known reserves of natural gas in the United States rose by about one-third (from 1,532 trillion cubic feet to 2,074 trillion cubic feet), just from 2006 to 2008.{467}

Even after a pool of petroleum has been discovered underground or under the sea and the oil is being extracted and processed, economic considerations prevent that pool of oil from being drained dry. As The Economist magazine put it:

 

A few decades ago, the average oil recovery rate from reservoirs was 20%; thanks to remarkable advances in technology, this has risen to about 35% today.{468}

 

In other words, nearly two-thirds of the oil in an underground pool is left in the pool, because it would be too costly to drain out all of it—or even most of it—with today’s technology and today’s oil prices. But the oil is still there and its location is already known. If and when we are genuinely “running out” of oil that is available at today’s costs of extraction and processing, then the next step would be to begin extracting and processing oil that costs a little more and, later, oil that costs a little more than that. But we are clearly not at that point when most of the oil that has been discovered is still left underground or under the sea. As technology improves, a higher rate of production of oil from existing wells becomes economically feasible. In 2007 the New York Times reported a number of examples, such as this:

 

The Kern River oil field, discovered in 1899, was revived when Chevron engineers here started injecting high-pressured steam to pump out more oil. The field, whose production had slumped to 10,000 barrels a day in the 1960s, now has a daily output of 85,000 barrels. {469}

 

Such considerations are not unique to petroleum. When coal was readily available above ground, it did not pay to dig into the ground and build coal mines, since the coal extracted at higher costs underground could not compete in price with coal that could be gathered at lower cost on the surface. Only after the coal available at the lowest cost was exhausted did it pay to begin digging into the ground for more.

The difference between the economic approach and the hysterical approach to natural resource usage was demonstrated by a bet between economist Julian Simon and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Professor Simon offered to bet anyone that any set of five natural resources they chose would not have risen in real cost over any time period they chose. A group led by Professor Ehrlich took the bet and chose five natural resources. They also chose ten years as the time period for measuring how the real costs of these natural resources had changed. At the end of that decade, not only had the real cost of that set of five resources declined, so had the cost of every single resource which they had expected to rise in cost! {470}Obviously, if we had been anywhere close to running out of those resources, their costs would have risen because the present value of these potentially more scarce resources would have risen.

In some ultimate sense, the total quantity of resources must of course be declining. However, a resource that would run out centuries after it becomes obsolete, or a thousand years after the sun grows cold, is not a serious practical problem. If it is going to run out within some time period that is a matter of practical relevance, then the rising present value of the resource whose exhaustion looms ahead will automatically force conservation, without either public hysteria or political exhortation.

Just as prices cause us to share scarce resources and their products with each other at a given time, present value causes us to share those resources over time with future generations—without even being aware that we are sharing. It is of course also possible to share politically, by having the government assume control of natural resources, as it can assume control of other assets, or in fact of the whole economy.

The efficiency of political control versus impersonal control by prices in the marketplace depends in part on which method conveys the underlying realities more accurately. As already noted in earlier chapters, price controls and direct allocation of resources by political institutions require far more explicit knowledge by a relatively small number of planners than is required for a market economy to be coordinated by prices to which millions of people respond according to their own first-hand knowledge of their own individual circumstances and preferences—and the relative handful of prices that each individual has to deal with.

Planners can easily make false projections, either from ignorance or from various political motives, such as seeking more power, re-election, or other goals. For example, during the 1970s, government scientists were asked to estimate the size of the American reserves of natural gas and how long it would last at the current rate of usage. Their estimate was that the United States had enough natural gas to last for more than a thousand years!{471} While some might consider this good news, politically it was bad news at a time when the President of the United States was trying to arouse public support for more government programs to deal with the energy “crisis.” This estimate was repudiated by the Carter administration and a new study begun, which reached more politically acceptable results.

Sometimes the known reserves of a natural resource seem especially small because the amount available at currently feasible costs is in fact nearing exhaustion within a few years. There may be vast amounts available at a slightly higher cost of extraction and processing, but these additional amounts will of course not be touched until the amount available at a lower cost is exhausted. For example, back when there were large coal deposits available on top of the ground, someone could sound an alarm that we were “running out” of coal that is “economically feasible” to use, coal that can be gotten without “prohibitive costs.” But again, the whole purpose of prices is to be prohibitive. In this case, that prohibition prevented more costly resources from being resorted to  needlessly, so long as there were less costly sources of the same resource available.

A similar situation exists today, when most of the petroleum found in an oil pool is left there because the costs of extracting more than the most easily accessible oil cannot be repaid by the current market price. During the oil crisis of 2005, when the price of gasoline in the United States shot up to double what it had been less than two years earlier, and people worried that the world was running out of petroleum, the Wall Street Journal reported:

 

The Athabasca region in Alberta, Canada, for instance, theoretically could produce about 1.7 trillion to 2.5 trillion barrels of oil from its 54,000 square miles of oil-sands deposits—making it second to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves. The Athabasca reserves remain largely untapped because getting the oil out of the sand is expensive and complicated. It takes about two tons of sand to extract one barrel of oil. But if oil prices remain near current levels—indeed, if prices stay above $30 a barrel, as they have since late 2003—oil-sands production would be profitable. Limited investment and production has been under way in Athabasca.{472}

 

If technology never improved, then all resources would become more costly over time, as the most easily obtained and most easily processed deposits were used up first and the less accessible, or less rich, or more difficult to process deposits were then resorted to. However, with improving technology, it can actually cost less to acquire future resources when their time comes, as happened with the resources that Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich bet on. For example, the average cost of finding a barrel of oil fell from $15 in 1977 to $5 by 1998.{473} It is hardly surprising that there were larger known oil reserves after the cost of knowing fell.

Petroleum is by no means unique in having its supply affected by prices. The same is true for the production of nickel as well, for example. When the price of nickel rose in the early twenty-first century, the Wall Street Journal reported:

 

A few years ago, it would have been hard to find a better example of a failed mining project than Murrin Murrin, a huge, star-crossed nickel operation deep in the Western Australian desert.

Now, Murrin Murrin is an investor favorite. Shares of the company that runs it. . .have more than tripled in the past year, and some analysts see room for more.

The surprising turnaround highlights a central fact of the current commodity boom: With prices this high—especially for nickel—even technically difficult or chronically troubled projects look good. Nickel is most widely used to make stainless steel.{474}

 

Although the reserves of natural resources in a nation are often discussed in terms of physical quantities, economic concepts of cost, prices, and present values must be considered if practical conclusions are to be reached. In addition to needless alarms about natural resources running out, there have also been, conversely, unjustifiably optimistic statements that some poor country has so many billions of dollars’ worth of “natural wealth” in the form of iron ore or bauxite deposits or some other natural resource.

Such statements mean very little without considering how much it would cost to extract and process those resources—and this varies greatly from place to place. Extraction of petroleum from Canada’s oil sands, for example, costs so much that until recent years the oil there was not even counted in the world’s petroleum reserves. But, when the price of oil shot up past $100 a barrel, Canada became one of the world’s leaders in petroleum reserves.