The Political Economy of the Resource Curse. Cursed by resources or institutions? Degrowth, expensive oil, and the new economics of energy. Energy: Friend or Enemy? by William D. Nordhaus. The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence by Michael J. Graetz MIT Press, 369 pp., $29.95 Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use a report by the National Research Council’s Committee on Health, Environmental, and Other External Costs and Benefits of Energy Production and Consumption.
Waiting for the Third Industrial Revolution. Edward B. Barbier A recent cover article of The Economist proclaimed that the world economy, and especially the United States, is on the verge of a “Third Industrial Revolution”. The First Industrial Revolution occurred in the late 18th century in Great Britain, with the mechanization of the textile industry and the birth of factory production. The Second Industrial Revolution began in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford introduced mass production through assembly line manufacturing. According to The Economist, the Third Industrial Revolution is already happening, again principally in the US, through the rise of digital manufacturing. This process essentially involves de-centralizing the factory system and replacing mass production with mass customization.
The Economist gives two examples of how the industrial world will change as a result: “An engineer working in the middle of a desert who finds he lacks a certain tool no longer has to have it delivered from the nearest city. Scarcity and Frontiers. Throughout much of history, a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting existing natural resources and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and conserve more of these resources. However, economies have also responded to increasing scarcity by obtaining and developing more of these resources. Since the agricultural transition over 12,000 years ago, this exploitation of new ‘frontiers' has often proved to be a pivotal human response to natural resource scarcity. This book provides a fascinating account of the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history.
This not only fills an important gap in the literature on economic history but also shows how we can draw lessons from these past epochs for attaining sustainable economic development in the world today.