To a Caveman Very Few Things Are Resources

There was a story on ITV in the UK, and they were talking about how much supposed waste that Amazon produces, that Amazon was destroying a whole bunch of products regularly, routinely. I thought, why are these people inserting their opinion into a business that they know absolutely nothing about? What would they prefer? Would they prefer Amazon to have the impossible, namely perfect knowledge of precisely how many products need to be made? In other words, an epistemologically impossible situation to be in, or would they prefer that Amazon made insufficient products so the people who wanted to purchase them weren't actually able to get hold of them?

What Amazon, of course, does is make slightly more than what they need. That's what happens in any business; they make slightly more than what they need. Now and again, I once had a venture capitalist argue to me that there were too many kinds of shoes, and it was an example of how capitalism had failed because nobody needs as many kinds of sneakers. It clearly overshadowed society. My question to him was, when did you know that there were too many shoes? What's the point in history where we decide there's too many shoes? Where before that, we need more shoes?

Because we need more stretchy shoes, we need more durable shoes, we need thicker sole shoes, we need lighter shoes, we need all kinds of amazing shoe innovation. And then at some point, somebody decides, now we have enough shoes; now we need to kill all the other shoe lines. Where did you come up with this idea that you just happen to be born in the right time in the right place to identify that yes, we have enough shoes?

This is a certain parochialism that everyone falls into. There's a more macro version of that, which is we're running out of resources philosophy, and it starts with the earth being finite. There's this finite set of resources; we're running out, and we're consuming them all. Therefore, we're all going to die if we don't tamp back our consumption.

First of all, how did you decide it was the earth? How did you decide that your town wasn't running out of resources? Why wasn't the town the actual area that you wanted to save, and then everything outside of that was foreign and unreachable? Why draw the boundary around the earth? We could go to the solar system, we could go to the galaxy, we could go to the universe, we could go to the multiverse. There's a lot of resources out there if you know how to harness them.

And then how do you define what a resource is? A resource is just something that, through knowledge, you can convert from one thing to another. So, there was a time when coal wasn't a resource, iron wasn't a resource to a caveman. Very few things are resources, just a few edible plants and a few edible animals, and that's it. But domestication, harvesting crops, metallurgy, chemistry, physics, developing engines and rockets— all of these are things that are taking things that we thought were worthless and turning them into resources.

Uranium has gone from being completely worthless to being an incredible resource. So, this finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says knowledge creation has come to an end; we are stuck at this current point, and therefore based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving. But knowledge is the thing that we can always create more of.