| Abstract: | Economists commonly use rent and unit costs as measures of non-renewable resource scarcity and identify the types of scarcity as Malthusian or Ricardian. Malthus and Ricardo, however, concerned themselves mainly with renewable agricultural land; Mill and Jevons provided major insights into non-renewable resource scarcity. A simple model of mining brings out the contributions of major classical and other writers and shows that unit costs and rent are not necessarily useful indicators of scarcity. Exhaustibility of the deposit and choice of capital stock appear more pertinent to firms' intertemporal decisions than exhaustibility of world reserves. |
