Financial analyst: “Pack up and move to the virtual world”

A highly regarded financial analyst tells us not to worry about rising commodity prices, because the developing world is moving away from products made of the real world. Rick Bookstaber writes

Given our evolved interests a few decades hence, most of us will be spending a fraction of our income on consumption. There just won't be a lot that we will demand that requires nonrenewable resources. What we will demand will be in the way of electronic products, which will only consume a few ounces of such commodities. We will basically eat, sleep, work and then veg out. Give us food, plumbing, heat and our two-hundred dollar experience machine games, and we will be happy as a clam.

People who are staring at a tsunami of demand for commodities from the developing world and predicting a doomsday of $400 oil and $4000 gold are missing the longer-term retreating tide of demand as citizens of the developed world actually demand decreasing amounts of energy, large goods, and heavy infrastructure. We won't be packing up and moving to Mars, as the science fiction solutions to resource depletion propose. We will pack up and move into the virtual world.

He says this like it's a good thing.

Sounds kind of like the devolved humans in Wall-E, doesn't it? 

WALL-E humans

Published by Kit Stolz

I'm a freelance reporter and writer based in Ventura County.

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