Your Teacher Said What?! by Joe Kernen Page A

lot of company. Most people don’t understand how proven oil reserves have grown over time, even as humanity has burned more and more oil. We have been compelled for decades to listen to constant alarms about impending shortages of oil (and gas and cadmium and rare earth and lithium . . .). It’s only common sense, after all: The planet isn’t producing any more oil, or anything else, so it stands to reason that if we started with x tons of palladium, for example, in the earth’s crust, and we use five thousand ounces a year (mostly for the catalytic converters in cars), there must be five thousand fewer ounces left behind. After a while, we’ll run out.
    Only we don’t. Back in 1980, the economist Julian Simon made a famous bet with the biologist and scarcitymonger Paul Ehrlich: He allowed Ehrlich, who had predicted worldwide famines and resource shortages for years, to pick any basket of commodities and hold them for ten years. If the prices increased because of those Ehrlich-promised shortages, he would pay the difference; if they decreased, Ehrlich would do the same. When the price of every one of Ehrlich’s picks—copper, tungsten, chromium, nickel, and tin—fell (tin, which traded for nearly $9 per pound in 1980, was only $3.88 in 1990)—he lost, though he’s still predicting imminent worldwide resource shortages, despite a record of doomsaying that is so far untarnished by success.
    The reason why Ehrlich lost—why “shortages” are always (at worst) temporary—is central to understanding free markets: So long as people have incentives to find a commodity, in the form of a price that is greater than the cost of finding it, they’ll do so. In economic terms, there are no shortages; there is simply a lag while price catches up to demand, and once it does, inventive people go get it.
    So long as they are permitted to assert a property right over what they find. Sometimes they can’t. Sometimes it’s impractical to divvy up something of value so that people can assert a property right to it, either because the value of the commodity is less than the cost of policing it—that’s why European and the northeastern U.S. forests were clear-cut 15 —or because technology hasn’t caught up with the potential for “propertizing” something.
    Which is what happened to television.
    When I tell Blake about growing up with only seven television channels to choose from, she gets the same look she had when I tried to prove to her that the earth seems to have, in economic terms, more oil now than when John D. Rockefeller started up Standard Oil of New Jersey. The remote control that operates the Kernen multimedia center not only has two dozen buttons operating previously unknown functions with mysterious acronyms like “CC,” “DVR,” “REC,” and “PIP” but also is capable of accessing more than fifteen hundred channels (and will probably, by the time you read this, have even more.)
    The introduction of a technology that could slice the electromagnetic spectrum into fine enough bands that a thousand different programs could be produced and sent into people’s homes hasn’t always been greeted with applause, particularly by America’s elites. However, it’s a stretch to argue that the quality of programming back in the “vast wasteland” days of the 1960s was better; I mean, I loved The Beverly Hillbillies , but then I was also ten years old. Does anyone really believe that Playhouse 90 was better than The Wire ? More instructively, the way in which the government involved itself in broadcasting when the airwaves were—sort of—regarded as a public asset was profoundly different. Back then, the only way to make sure that the electromagnetic frequency used to send The Beverly Hillbillies into your home did so without interference from another frequency was by the most heavy-handed