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The Bitcoin Standard Podcast cover image

197. Principles of Economics: Interview with Jimmy Song

The Bitcoin Standard Podcast

NOTE

The Real Scarcity is in the Scarcity of Human Time

In 50 years, our consumption of resources has increased significantly, yet the price of oil has gone down and the proven reserves continue to grow. The real scarcity is in human time, as there is no limit to the amount of resources we can have. However, it would be too time-consuming and impractical to fully exploit even a fraction of what is available. So, the true challenge lies in managing our time efficiently rather than worrying about resource scarcity.

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So in 50 years, the reserves are going to be done. And yet 50 years down the line, you find that our consumption has gone up significantly more. We've consumed maybe fivefold, five times more than what we consumed 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And yet the price of oil is gone down and the proven reserves of oil continue to go up. What has gone up also is human wages. So what this tells us is that the real scarcity is in the scarcity of human time. There's no limit on how much oil or gold or copper we can have, practically speaking, except how much time we dedicate to that. Because there's an infinite ocean of all of these things under the crust of the earth that we could just keep digging out. But we're never going to get anywhere near finishing 1% of that because it's way too expensive in terms of our time. If we wanted to keep digging into the gold to find all the gold or all the copper, we could starve ourselves as we stop producing anything else and keep focusing on only making more and more and more copper or gold or whatever it is. And we still wouldn't make a dent in the gigantic stores of this that exist on earth.

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