Excerpted from a paper by Leonard L. Fischman, prepared for presentation at the 135th annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, Atlanta, Georgia, August 25, 1975.
Preoccupation with forecasting long-range materials demand and supply is not exactly new: what changes is the motivation and focus of the interest. An early concern in the United States was with how long we could maintain self-sufficiency. Later, when the Paley Commission was doing its work in the early fifties, the emphasis was on security of the long-range materials flows needed to support U.S. economic growth and U.S. commitments to the rest of the "free world." (Resources for Freedom was the name of the Commission's report.) In the late fifties, when work began on the RFF project that was eventually to culminate in Resources in America's Future (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), the focus of concern had shifted from security to simple adequacy. By 1970, the meaning of "adequacy" had been expanded, and the prevailing question had become one of long-run worldwide "limits to growth." This then became modified into a more urgent concern with the tradeoff between material growth and ecological damage—an emphasis expressed in the title of the June 1973 final report of the National Commission on Materials Policy, Material Needs and the Environment Today and Tomorrow.
Then came the Arab oil embargo and the major price aggression by OPEC, and the balance of concern shifted back to security and self sufficiency. This is where the principal focus still lies, although the initial fear that there would soon arise a host of raw-material "OPECs" has since somewhat subsided. Still, the veins of interest in simple long-range adequacy, limits to growth, and ecological tradeoffs are far from exhausted.
One might suppose that it matters little where the concentration of concern might be, that the analysis of raw materials outlook would be the same regardless of the questions to be answered. This is true to a degree, but in the end the differences in focus can and must be controlling. For example, those concerned with ultimate limits must look forward a lot longer than those who are concerned with the more usual range of forward planning. Those who are concerned with security of supply must dwell a great deal more on the politics and attitudes of who has and produces what than do those whose concern is confined to simple physical adequacy. And so on. General-purpose projections, like general-purpose data, need to be sifted through the screen of some purposeful analysis before anything much can be made of them.
A version of this article appeared in print in the October 1975 issue of Resources magazine.
