Friday, September 9, 2011

Lecture 9/2

Lesson #1: Debt can be good because it can allow you to pay for initiatives that can make people healthy, wealthy, and wise even if we can’t afford it per se. For example, if we pay for roads that are more efficient for truckers but can’t afford it, that can still be beneficial for the population. Not all borrowing is bad.
Lesson #2: There are  531, 300,000,000 barrels of crude oil in the earth. We use 16, 500, 000,000 per year, so theoretically oil will run out in 32.2 years. But according to economists, we will never run out of oil. That is because throughout history, people have always sought to use the cheapest, most time efficient energy sources, and it oil gets super rare and super expensive, they will find alternative energy sources. For example, in the 18th (19th?) century, wood was the main energy source, and trees were pretty convenient and easy to access at first, but soon it became a huge schlep just to get to one tree, so it became neither time nor energy efficient to cut trees, and once coal was found, people stopped cutting down trees for energy.
Pistachio analogy illustrating same concept: If you are addicted to pistachios and have a life time supply, and the only way to get the last pistachio is dive under the ocean, you’re not going to do that because it is neither cheap nor efficient. It would be easier to go to Wegmans and find something else you like

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