La Bourse / Volume II / Nº II.01 / Quiz, reflection, essays

A watercolour of a river winding through autumn trees, two small figures walking its bank toward a low sun. — Plate II.01 · Quiz, reflection, essaysTwo Bowls, One Spring.The spring is not scarce. The bowl is. Almost everything this volume argues is contained in the difference between those two sentences.

ASSESSMENT · Chapter II.01 — From Scarcity to Abundance

Three instruments: a ten-point quiz, eight reflection questions, five essay prompts. The quiz checks comprehension rather than recall. The reflections are private and first-person. The essays are arguable from more than one side.

THE QUIZ — ten points

Four on recall.

1. Name the four senses of scarce the chapter separates, and say which one is a fact about the world rather than about arrangement.

Thermodynamically bounded, positional, entitlement-limited, institutionally enclosed. Only the first is a fact about the world; the other three are facts about arrangement. One mark for the four, one for identifying the first — the chapter's claim is not that scarcity is unreal, it is that three of its four forms are built rather than found.

2. Define rival and excludable, and state which is a property of the good and which of the institution.

Rival: one person's use diminishes what is available to another. Excludable: it is practically possible to prevent someone from using it. Rivalry is a property of the good — physics. Excludability is a property of the institution — a choice. A good that is non-rival and has been made excludable has been made artificially rivalrous; nothing physical changed.

3. In the USGS's definitions, what is the difference between reserves and resources?

Reserves are that part of the identified resource which could be economically extracted at the time of determination — current technology, current prices, current law, ground someone currently has permission to dig. Resources are what has been identified at any grade, whether or not extraction pays today. Every qualifier in the reserve definition is economic or legal. None is geological.

4. State the circulation multiplier and what p is.

M = 1 / (1 − p), where p is the fraction of material in service that returns to service each cycle, and M is the service delivered per tonne of virgin material. p = 50% gives 2.00×; p = 80% gives 5.00×.

Four on application.

5. A colleague says: "Lithium reserves are 28 million tonnes and we use 180,000 a year, so we have 155 years. There is no problem." What is missing, in two respects?

First, the draw is not flat: lithium consumption grew 23 percent in 2023 alone, and at a conservative 10 percent a year the 155-year static life becomes 29.4 years. Second, "reserves" is not a measure of what exists; identified resources are 105 Mt, and neither figure is a statement about the crust. Full marks require both — and the stronger answer notes they pull in opposite directions, which is exactly why the static-life number is quoted so often and means so little.

6. Your supply team reports a shortage of a specialty alloy. Give the four questions you would ask, in order, and say why that order.

Is the good rival? Is the constraint thermodynamic — and what is the ratio of current practice to the theoretical minimum? Is it positional, and in which of the five positions? Is it enclosed? The order is cheapest-to-establish first, immovable-answer second so you know early whether you have one, most-likely third, most-contested last — so that when you arrive at enclosure you have ruled out the others and the argument is about the actual disagreement.

7. A vaccine is in short supply. A colleague argues that the manufacturer's patent is irrelevant because "the real constraint is fill-finish capacity." Assess the argument.

It conflates two goods that are physically different. The dose is rival and fill-finish capacity is a genuine positional constraint on it. The formulation is non-rival and its scarcity is institutional. Both can be true at once, and resolving the second does not by itself resolve the first. Credit any answer that separates dose from formulation; the strongest note that enclosure also shapes how much fill-finish capacity was built, and by whom, and on what horizon.

8. Why does the chapter say that the finding "almost no shortage is geological" is not reassuring?

Because a shortage that is a price event rather than a geological one is still a shortage to anyone who cannot pay. It relocates the problem from geology, where nothing can be done, to arrangement, where everything can — and where the people who arrange things have interests. The strongest answer reaches phosphate: 336 years of static life, more than 300 billion tonnes of resource, 67.6 percent of reserves in one jurisdiction, and a season farmed without fertiliser in 2008.

Two that require the arithmetic to be done.

9. Copper reserves are 1,000 Mt, identified resources 2,100 Mt, and 2023 production 22 Mt. Assume draw grows at 2.5 percent a year. Compute exhaustion on reserves and on identified resources, and say what the difference is worth. Show your working.

Static lives: 1,000 / 22 = 45.5 years and 2,100 / 22 = 95.5 years. Apply T = ln(1 + g·L) / ln(1 + g) with g = 0.025, so ln(1.025) = 0.02469. Reserves: ln(1 + 0.025 × 45.5) = ln(2.136) = 0.7591; 0.7591 / 0.02469 = 30.7 years. Resources: ln(1 + 0.025 × 95.5) = ln(3.386) = 1.2198; 1.2198 / 0.02469 = 49.4 years. Doubling the stock buys 18.7 years. Credit any method landing near 31 and 49. The point of the question is that the answer to "find more" is a number, and it is smaller than anyone expects.

10. Your operation currently recovers 50 percent of a material at end of life. Someone proposes an exploration programme that would double the identified resource. What recovery fraction would deliver the same result, and what would it take to deliver four times the stock?

M = 1/(1−p). At p = 0.50, M = 2.00× — the existing recovery already equals a doubled stock. To match a 4× stock you need 1/(1−p) = 4, so p = 0.75. Generally p = 1 − 1/M: 67 percent for 3×, 90 percent for 10×. Twenty-five points of additional recovery is worth more than every deposit an exploration programme could plausibly find. The stronger answer notes the non-linearity: 80 → 90 percent doubles the multiplier again, so the last ten points are worth more than the first fifty.

REFLECTION — eight questions, for one person and a pen

These are not for a room. Write the answers by hand if you can; the slowness is the point.

Think of something you have described as scarce in the last month. Which of the four senses did you mean — and did you know at the time?

Where in your own life is something genuinely abundant and simply not plumbed? Answer about time, attention and skill before answering about anything material.

What do you hold that costs you nothing to give and that you have not given? Not as an accusation — as an inventory.

Recall a time you were short of something and the shortage turned out to have an address. What changed in your body when you found out where it was?

Which of your own constraints have you never tested against its theoretical floor? Pick one and estimate the ratio, roughly, now.

Where are you drawing on a stock whose regeneration rate you have never estimated, and would you rather not know?

Think of a good you pay for that has no marginal cost of reproduction. What would change for you if it did not, and what would change for the person who made it?

What have you been told is a physical limit that you now suspect is somebody's arrangement? Write the sentence that would test it.

ESSAY PROMPTS — five

Each is arguable from more than one side. Each requires at least one source the chapter cites and at least one it does not.

1. The Simon–Ehrlich wager, thirty-five years on. Julian Simon won a decade-long bet that the real prices of five metals would fall between 1980 and 1990. Argue either that he was right about the thing that matters — that human ingenuity repeatedly converts apparent limits into positional problems — or that he won on a metric that was never measuring what Ehrlich meant. Engage the chapter's reserves-versus-resources material directly, and read Simon's The Ultimate Resource alongside at least one source on the wager's aftermath that the chapter does not cite.

2. Is enclosure of non-rival goods ever welfare-improving on net? Romer's model needs some excludability or nobody funds the having of the idea; Nordhaus's estimate has innovators capturing about 2.2 percent of the surplus their innovations generate. Argue for a domain — pharmaceuticals, software, agricultural genetics, academic publishing — where current exclusivity is set badly, and say in which direction and by how much. Use Romer (1990) and at least one empirical study of patent duration or breadth that the chapter does not cite.

3. Sen's entitlement approach and its limits. The entitlement framework explains famine without a fall in food availability. Argue either that it is the correct general model of material deprivation, or that it is a correct account of a particular class of famine that has been over-extended. Use Poverty and Famines, and at least one source on a famine where availability did collapse — the Irish, Ukrainian or Ethiopian cases are all well documented — that the chapter does not cite.

4. Circularity as a substitute for exploration. The chapter computes that raising copper recovery from 50 to 80 percent is worth more than every identified and undiscovered copper resource. Write the strongest case against acting on that arithmetic: dissipative losses, alloy contamination, collection costs, the energy of reprocessing, and the fact that a growing stock in service cannot be supplied from a smaller stock retired. Then write the rebuttal. Use the UNEP International Resource Panel report, and at least one materials-flow or life-cycle study the chapter does not cite.

5. Does the four-sense classification survive contact with interest? The chapter concedes that whoever classifies a shortage decides the budget, and that a good can be rival in one regime and non-rival in another. Argue either that separating classifier from beneficiary is sufficient — as it is held to be in audit — or that the classification will always be captured and something stronger is required. Use Ostrom on institutional design, and at least one source on regulatory capture, measurement gaming or Goodhart's law that the chapter does not cite.