Resources - Environmental Transformations - page 34

operations of the free market can help humanity
avoid serious resource shortages. The first of
these two assumptions is derived from the work
of Ester Boserup, and is often referred to as
Boserupian . The second assumption is most closely
associated with a school of economic thinking that
emerged from the work of a series of economists
based at the University of Chicago in the post-
World War II years, and is referred to as
neoliberalism (see Peck, 2010). Let us now consider
both of these perspectives and what they might
mean for how we understand the relation between
humans and environmental resources.
Ester Boserup was a Danish economist whose
analysis of agricultural development is seen as one
of the most significant challenges to Malthusian
thinking. In her famous book The Conditions of
Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian
Change under Population Pressure , Boserup (1965)
argued against the Malthusian understanding of
the relation between population growth and food
supply. Whereas Malthus claimed that population
growth was controlled by food supply - with
population growth being halted as soon as food
production could not match increasing demand -
Boserup argued that the supply of food was actually
determined by population growth (Boserup,
1965). For Boserup, population played two
important roles in historically observed patterns
of increasing food production. First, increases in
population created the incentive (namely more
people demanding more food) for societies to
develop the new practices and technologies that
could increase food output. Second, the presence
of more people, with their imaginative and creative
potentials, increased the likelihood that new ways
would be discovered to increase food production.
These ideas have often been associated with
Boserup's notion that 'necessity is the mother of
invention'. It is important to note here, however,
that there are a complex series of factors that are
associated with the emergence of new technologies
and inventions (including chance, opportunity,
accident), of which necessity is only one factor (see
Gladwell, 2009).

If Boserup's work can been seen as a celebration
of human creativity, neoliberal cornucopians
tend to emphasize the broader creative oppor-
tunities that are generated within free markets.
Neoliberal thought is most closely associated with
the influential work of Friedrich Hayek, Milton
Friedman and their colleagues at the University
of Chicago (Peck, 2010). The so-called 'Chicago
Boys' (Klein, 2007) emphasize the great benefits
that can be gained by organizing societies around
free markets. In keeping with Boserup, the Chicago
Boys claim that markets provide economic incen-
tives for people to innovative - developing new
products and technologies - as the competitive
nature of markets mean that people are constantly
looking for new forms of economic advantage.
Neoliberals also recognize that through the
changing prices of commodities (such as food,
gold and oil), markets provide a very efficient way
of telling producers which products are in greatest
demand, and of providing extra investment (in the
form of high prices) into resource sectors where
there may be barriers to supply.
The work of Julian Simon (which we discussed
in the introduction to this chapter) represents
one of the clearest applications of neoliberal
thinking to the analysis of resource use and supply.
At the heart of Simon's argument is the assertion
that the declining prices of many resources (such
as the ones covered in his wager with Paul Ehrlich)
illustrate the value of markets. According to Simon,
it is free markets that both encourage innovation
within, and ensure the supply of extra investment
to, sectors where the supply of resources may be
limited (and prices are high), and in the long term
see these sectors produce more output (thus
reducing the relative price of the commodity in
question). In section 2.3.4 below, we will explore
some significant critiques that have emerged to
neoliberal analyses of human resource use.

2.3.3 Hubbert's curve and the
peakists
We have already briefly discussed theories of peak
resource production in this chapter. In this section