“The importance of economic principles extends beyond things that most people think of as economics. For example, those who worry about the exhaustion of petroleum, iron ore, or other natural resources often assume that they are discussing the amount of physical stuff on the planet. But that assumption changes radically when you realize that statistics on “known reserves” of these resources may tell us more about costs of exploration, and about the interest rate on the money that finances this exploration, than about how much of the resource remains on Earth. Nor is the amount of physical stuff necessarily what matters, without knowing how much of it can be extracted and processed at what costs.”
— Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell