I’m a fan of people trying things, even if they seem silly. Dismissing risky ideas misses the point of research.

But thoughtful criticism can direct effort to more promising fields. To that end, I’m going to try to make my criticism as constructive as possible, with concrete reasons for my pessimism and closely related research areas which are promising (and stand to benefit even from failures in the field I’m criticizing).

Not every section will live up to that standard; some arguments are built on vibes alone. I might be wrong, so I still want to see people work on these problems.

Preliminaries

Exhaustible resources more expensive long-term

The theory of exhaustible resources suggests that “the real price of an exhaustible resource should grow at a rate equal to the real interest rate.” The data are consistent with this hypothesis[1].

Innovations in search and extraction can dramatically lower prices in the short term, but in the long term, we converge on a correct way to do things. Once extraction is solved, prices return to their slow upward climb.