Cornucopianism

Cornucopianism is the belief that human ingenuity and technological progress can overcome resource scarcity and environmental limits. It emphasizes substitution, innovation, and expanding supplies over fixed natural limits.

Induced innovation: Technological change prompted by incentives, constraints, or shifts in relative prices. Cornucopian arguments often treat rising resource prices as incentives to develop alternatives.
Thomas Malthus: An English political economist whose population theory argued that population tends to outgrow subsistence. Cornucopianism developed partly as a response to Malthusian predictions of recurring scarcity.
Malthusianism: The view that population growth tends to outstrip the growth of food and other necessities. It treats scarcity as a recurring consequence of growth, unlike cornucopian confidence in adaptation.
Hubbert peak theory: A model predicting that production from a finite resource field rises, peaks, and then declines. Its focus on geological production limits contrasts with expectations of technological adaptation.
Absolute decoupling: A decline in total environmental pressure while economic output continues to grow. Whether sustained absolute decoupling occurs at the necessary scale tests a key cornucopian expectation.
Resource substitution: Replacing one resource or material with another to provide a similar service. Substitution is the main way cornucopians explain continued production when a resource becomes scarce.
Julian Simon: An American economist who argued that human ingenuity makes people the ultimate resource. Simon became the best-known modern advocate of cornucopian reasoning.
Neo-Malthusianism: Modern arguments that population and consumption growth can exceed ecological limits. It extends Malthusian concerns to pollution, biodiversity, and finite resources.
Shale revolution: The rapid expansion of oil and gas production through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. It illustrates how technology can turn previously inaccessible deposits into major supplies.
Substitution elasticity: A measure of how readily users replace one input with another when their relative prices change. Low substitutability can make technological responses inadequate when essential resources become scarce.

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