Just FYI, I've got gold more than doubling in about three months, from around 400 in Nov '79 to over 900 in Jan '80. At the time, I was too busy getting stoned, reading Dostoevsky, and worrying about the end of the world to notice. Whoever bought gold at 900/oz must also have been smoking something funny, or must have been even more worried about the end of the world, and probably should have been reading Dostoevsky instead.
Those were the days: They were trying to convince us that no matter what we did, we were going to run out of all those nifty commodities you mentioned, and the whole shebang was going to grind to a halt, and small had better be beautiful because it was all anyone was going to be able to afford. Turned out you could run modern industrial economies much more efficiently than anyone knew, and still increase productivity and consumption at unexpected rates. We won't know for a good long while, I suspect, whether commodity deflation of the type you describe is intrinsic to technological progress and theoretically without limit, or whether the last few centuries or so since Descartes noticed that you could systematically apply logic and mathematics to manipulation of the material world have just been an anomalous interlude.
If we have a bit of making up to do on energy, that doesn't mean we can't do it. Heck, if we want to, we can replace pork bellies with tofu bellies, and, one of these days, if you need some gold for something, you'll say, "Hey, computer, gimme some gold, and throw in a pork belly while you're at it" and it'll stew some up for you, just like in Star Trek, but with better haircuts. And it'll be darn good gold (and kosher pork), though maybe not as much better than regular old gold, or Rolled Gold, for that matter, as today's cars are than those noisy, stinking, rattling, gas-guzzling, lead-fuming 8-track-playing death trap POS's we used to think were so neat. |
