I just read two accidentally adjacent articles in the New York Times this morning. One was on the doubling of rice prices in the last three months, and what great hardship that is placing on people all over the world who rely on rice for their calories. The other was about thieves not stealing cars anymore, but instead stealing the catalytic converters. They’re easy to steal, you just saw them off, and then the platinum in them (which is now up to $2,300 per ounce, more than double gold) causes them to fetch great value on the black market.

Both of these items point out how scarce all of our commodities in the world are becoming, and will continue to become. Both of these point out how we have to use all of our resources more carefully — not just the ones we usually talk about, like coal and oil. In general, we humans are going to have to get a lot better at “doing more with less” to quote a famous engineering dictum. I believe there will continue to be big rewards to those who figure out how to do to more with less. The more we can achieve our happiness and utility using fewer “atoms,” whatever those atoms may be, the better off humanity will be, and for sure, the less resource wars we will have.