ABSTRACT
An attempt to define the hypothesis of increasing resource scarcity for a parametrically variant world and to test it in a variety of ways for the United States over nearly a century of rapid economic growth was undertaken in Part III. In the aggregate, the results of the various tests were overwhelmingly negative. Labor-capital cost per unit of gross national product fell rapidly, without retardation, over the entire period; and there was no observable tendency for the cost of extractive output as such to fall more slowly, as might have been expected if resource scarcity had been increasing. In terms of our models, resource conversion cost—as represented by the unit cost of extractive output—declined throughout the period. When particular extractive sectors were examined separately, only the cost of forest output was found to have risen over the period as a whole. The question arises how to interpret these results, or analogous results that could be expected from studies of other industrial countries, both over the past century and into the predictable future. The question at issue is whether the cost-reducing forces can keep up with, or ahead of, those that tend to increase costs.
