Hat tip to DeAnander for spotting this one.
For sure, the history of oil is complex, and the fluctuations in the supply of oil have an extraordinarily complicated relation to price, demand, and reserves. But in order to understand scarcity - whether of oil in particular or of commodities under capitalism in general - you have to look at the discourses of scarcity and of poverty. And that means you have to look at the historical moment of the institutionalizing of economics – defined in the textbooks as “the study of choice under scarcity” – as the dominant way of talking about the world, and the relation of these to capitalist modernity. And that story is indeed interesting.
Posted by stan in Analysis