"The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990."
Interesting. But the club of Rome predicted in the 70ies problems for the first half of the 21st century. And I think they are going to win the bet. Two blogs I can recommend:
Did she make more cautious predictions going forward, after making such badly failed predictions 16 years ago? If she did, I didn't see it. It looks like Our Finite World is still a drumbeat of predictions about crises just ahead. If she's eventually correct about a specific prediction it will be a case of the stopped clock showing the correct time by chance.
The Analysis section seems to paint a differing picture, one where if you change the variables (commodities chosen and time-scale) either one of them could've won the bet. Do you know of another example?
Hong Kong is largely irrelevant to any comparison of England in the 1980s and today, while the largest changes in the country would be rightly put down to the effects of a transition to services, ending of the cold war and membership of the European Union.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the article points out it's just good old fashioned speculation in the commodities market! Clearly there was a massive bubble over the past couple of years driven by hype. The spot price is still higher than 2020
Everyone can recognize a bubble once it pops. But the last three years, what you call "bubble" was rational (?) speculation that lithium 1) was going to be needed on a massive scale and 2) virtually all the profitable sources were already being mined.
Also, between 2020 and 2023 we have a ~20% inflation, and the price is not yet stable.
>and 2) virtually all the profitable sources were already being mined
There have been massive investments in lithium mining over the past few years, especially in Western countries, partly for business and partly for strategic geopolitical reasons. So there's nothing rational about that assumption and I don't think any serious investor made it either because all this is public knowledge among insiders and easily researched. The price spikes are simply based on demand and speculation. Short term there was/is a serious shortage and that's reflected in the price. Also once production of EVs really ramps up, this could repeat. There's definitely no sign of overinvestment in terms of mining and processing.
I was always on the side of "we will figure it out". You can see a question mark after the word "rational", because I recall arguing with very-knowledgeable-and-insider people right here, in HN, that assured that all the high yield and profitable lithium was already being mined, and no significant new lithium will be discovered.
I took my downvotes for saying that if the demand increased, either the supply will also increase or an alternative will be discovered/developed. And now I'm taking my downvotes for remembering that there was no feeling of bubble (although hindsight is always 20/20), but that the price spike was based on very rational (?) analysis.
