Abstract
If you meet someone at a party who says that he is Napoleon, you don’t start discussing cavalry tactics at Waterloo ─ Professor Robert SolowWell that depends, Robert. If he is the gentleman who gave the party, and you would like to receive another invitation from him some day, you might feel it wise to suggest that if his boys had been riding elephants or dinosaurs instead of horses, he might have enjoyed another few years in swinging Paris instead of being turned over to that nasty Sir Hudson Lowe on St. Helena. [...]
Highlights
Until about 2008 it was the oil optimists who gave most of the parties – or at least supplied the music. It is highly significant – and enjoyable – that we only encounter a few of those people at the present time, it continues to be annoying when we suddenly find ourselves confronted with humorless pundits who reject mainstream economics, geology, and statistics, and denounce the oil market realism that is occasionally showcased by our sterling media
I was about 30 years off target, because at one time a shortage of oil could have resulted in a very ugly political and/or economic scene, if large oil consuming countries elected to compete for a piece of the remaining supplies with the aid of military assets
The question can be asked how John von Neumann – often called the best brain of the 20th century – might have approached this issue. This is not the place to elaborate on game theory, but I happen to believe that if von Neumann had thought that the later contributions of e.g., game theorist and Nobel Laureate John Nash were of great import, he might have devoted a few minutes of his time to deriving them for the book he wrote with Oscar Morgenstern [3]. (Nash’s life and work were turned into a moronic burlesque in the film called ‘A Beautiful Mind’, to which he apparently gave his approval)
Summary
The explanation for that geopolitical summit is the apparent peaking (or ‘flattening’) of conventional non-OPEC oil production several years earlier, as well as the kind of sophistication that I expected OPEC countries to show when I published my oil book [2]. This is not the place to elaborate on game theory, but I happen to believe that if von Neumann had thought that the later contributions of e.g., game theorist and Nobel Laureate John Nash were of great import, he might have devoted a few minutes of his time to deriving them for the book he wrote with Oscar Morgenstern [3].
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