I guess Paul Allen just threw away all that money huh?
unicus.com
Snip from Unlimited Wealth:
In which we define the First Law of Alchemy, which explains how technology determines the nature of physical resources; the Second Law of Alchemy, which explains how technology
determines the supply of physical resources; and most important of all, the Third Law of Alchemy, which explains what controls the advance of technology--and hence contains the key to wealth.
In the early 1970s, pessimism was the order of the day. The world, it was said, was running out of everything. Unless radical action was taken immediately--action that included massive conservation efforts and a wholesale lowering of Western standards of living--humankind was doomed.
At bottom, this apocalyptically gloomy view of things was probably nothing more than an understandable reaction to the optimism of the previous decade. Nonetheless, it did have a specific genesis: the publication early in 1972 of The Limits to Growth, an enormously influential--and utterly downbeat--study issued by the Club of Rome, a collection of distinguished industrialists, scientists, economists, sociologists, and government officials from twenty-five countries.[1]
The Club of Rome had commissioned the study three years earlier, recruiting a team of seventeen experts--ranging from an Iranian population analyst to a Norwegian pollution specialist--to peer down the road a bit and report back on humankind's economic and environmental prospects. Working first under the direction of futurist Jay Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then under Forrester's colleague, MIT business professor Dennis Meadows, the experts used some of the most sophisticated computer modeling techniques then available to produce a 197-page report that came to a genuinely shocking conclusion.
What their computer models told them was that with the world's population growing at a rate of about 2 percent a year and industrial output rising by 7 percent annually, the world's physical resources would be exhausted sometime in the next few decades--a calamity, they said, that could wind up wiping out most of humanity before the year 2100.
The study's impact was phenomenal. For as long as anyone could remember, economic growth had been regarded as the solution to all of humankind's woes; now, suddenly, it seemed to be the problem. Thinking big was deemed archaic, if not downright anti-social. The party was over; it was time for people everywhere to pull up their socks and lower their expectations. You might not like it, but what could you do? The Club of Rome wasn't a bunch of anti-social hippies, but an organization of some of the most highly regarded businesspeople, researchers and intellectuals of the day. And their conclusions seemed so scientific. As Time magazine noted: "Meadows is no latter-day Malthus prophesying doom on the basis of intuition: instead he has produced the first vision of the apocalypse ever prepared by a computer."
To be sure, not everyone was persuaded by The Limits to Growth that the sky was falling. There were more than a few skeptics who scoffed at the Club of Rome's cheerless projections as misleading and short-sighted. But most such doubts were washed away the following year when Arab oil producers responded to the 1973 Yom Kippur war in the Middle East first by unilaterally raising prices and then by cutting off deliveries to the West. Though the actual
embargo didn't last very long, the price hikes stuck--in the process, establishing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as a force to be reckoned with. They also marked what at the time seemed to be the end of the era of cheap and abundant energy--an era that most people took to be synonymous with prosperity and growth.
What followed over the next few years seemed to prove the doomsayers right. Between 1973 and 1981, soaring energy prices pitched the United States headlong into its worst recession in four decades. Economic growth sputtered to a halt, unemployment mounted, and inflation soared, seemingly out of control. Long lines became commonplace at gas stations, with frustrated motorists often coming to blows. Electrical brown-outs became a regular feature of urban summers, and with heating oil deliveries uncertain nervous New England homeowners turned down their thermostats in winter.
The future looked grim indeed. Americans, we were told, would have to tighten their belts, garage their cars, turn off their appliances, and generally adjust to lower standards of living. The government even printed up millions of gasoline ration cards. As David Rockefeller observed in 1975, there seemed no getting around the fact that there were now "constraints on the rate of economic growth, constraints that were not apparent in the preceding twenty years."
In short, it looked as if the world we had known--the world of expansion and prosperity, of thinking big and rising expectations--was coming to an end. In its place, a new image came to dominate our thinking: that of the earth as a fragile spaceship with a rapidly declining store of supplies and fuel. And the consensus was that we had better get used to it. "The idea of sitting still until this thing blows over is just a bunch of nonsense," declared the president of Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Inc., one of the nation's largest management-consulting firms, in 1975. "It ain't gonna blow over. You can bet that for the next generation we're going to have to live with the conditions we've seen over the last decade."
But then a strange thing happened. The world didn't come to an end.
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