Introduction: scarcity and frontiers

Edward B. Barbier

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511781131.002

1 - Introduction: scarcity and frontiers

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Edward B. Barbier

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Edward B. Barbier: Affiliation:
University of Wyoming

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Summary

Resource development is a neglected topic in economic history. To be sure, no economist would be surprised to learn that resource abundance is a function of extraction and transportation cost as well as of physical availability, and the role of substitution in mitigating resource scarcity is widely appreciated … But natural resources still are viewed as the last of the exogenous factors, governed by the principle of diminishing returns in an economic growth process whose other constituents have come to be treated both as endogenous and subject to increasing returns.

(David and Wright 1997, p. 204)

Introduction

For an early Spring day in Washington, DC in 1913, the weather was overcast but mild. The large crowd milling about the Capitol were jubilant and expectant. After all, their presidential candidate, Woodrow Wilson, had swept to victory the previous November, ousting the incumbent William Taft and soundly beating the third party candidate Theodore Roosevelt.

To the average American, Woodrow Wilson embodied the spirit and success of his times. His life and career spanned the US Civil War of the 1860s, the hard post-war years of reconstruction and reconciliation, and, from 1870 onwards, the rapid expansion of the US economy across the North American continent. Woodrow Wilson also typified the American Dream. The son of a southern Presbyterian minister, Wilson grew up in the South but eventually became a professor at Princeton University and then its President. He entered politics and was Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. He ran for President for the first time and won. Just like the United States itself, there seemed to be no limits to what this mild-mannered, devout and hard-working American could accomplish.

Type: Chapter
Information: Scarcity and Frontiers
How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation
, pp. 1 - 46

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781131.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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