I’ve now twice been sent the Julian Grantham piece, so I read it. And now that I’ve read it, I might as well review it.
First a roundup of other commentary on this thing, which I read without realizing it was about the same paper:
Tyler Cowen (always start with Tyler Cowen)
Krugman and Ryan Avant and Tim Worstall.
My first comment is that this is one of THOSE ISSUES that people get super excited about, which means the tone of people writing on this tends to be over-the-top. I wish people would just put their thesaurus away and make their points once and move on.
My second comment is that this graph kind of makes the whole thing look a bit ridiculous.
So we freak out every thirty years or so, then see progressively deeper and deeper troughs? Is this even REMOTELY enough data to conclude anything?
Why isn’t there any discussion of the effect of higher prices on substitution? Isn’t that a supremely powerful force at high energy prices?
Last comment is that everyone who wants to understand the context of this article should read a bunch of Julian Simon.
Not Unreasonable 