Jim Manzi calls it the Icarus Syndrome:
Successful modern economies create unprecedented wealth and material ease, but they also tend to generate characteristic anxieties. One of them is the recurring belief that the whole thing is a house of cards. Psychologically, this is the fear that there is some hidden danger that will cause modern society to collapse, and that we would have been better off if we had stayed lower to the ground and not tried to build such an overwhelming success. The most compelling of these stories often involve problems that the modern system has supposedly created itself.
An earlier example is the British Coal Panic:
William Ewart Gladstone, in his 1866 budget speech, warned that Britain faced the prospect of exhausting its domestic coal within a century and had poor prospects of finding sufficient alternative energy sources. This was not an idiosyncratic point of view. The year before, the economist William Stanley Jevons’s influential book The Coal Question had made the same prediction and proposed a set of policies to conserve coal for the inevitable lean times. John Stuart Mill supported both the thesis and Jevons’s proposals. Newspapers took up the “Coal Panic,” and a Royal Commission on Coal was created. Eventually the issue fizzled, and Britain moved on to other, more pressing, concerns.It was true that British coal production could not grow indefinitely, and it did not. The essential points that Jevons missed, however, were the feasibility of displacing coal with petroleum as a source of energy and the decreasing centrality of low-cost coal to the industries that were to lead Britain in the 20th century. But then again, as the great physicist Niels Bohr reportedly said, “Prediction is hard, especially concerning the future.”
The obvious modern analog is Peak Oil:
The peak oil theory usually proceeds from the correct prediction in 1956 by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert that oil production in the United States would hit its high sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Advocates, however, much more rarely note that in 1974 Hubbert also predicted that global oil production would peak in about 1995. Whoops. It turns out that it’s more feasible to predict peak production in very well-understood geography, such as the United States, than for the world as a whole.
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Caruso identified 36 academic forecasts for peak oil published between 1972 and 2004. There is an obvious pattern in the data. Roughly speaking, academic forecasts indicate that we are about 20 years from peak oil today, just as such forecasts generally indicated that we were about 20 years from peak oil throughout the 1970s and 1980s. What if we had reacted to these earlier, incorrect predictions of resource exhaustion with, as many advocated at the time, government coercion to force a decrease in petroleum use and to limit growth? We very likely would not have found ourselves on the other side of one of the greatest periods of wealth creation in American history, and therefore would probably not be in the happy position of paying, even at 2008 prices, a smaller share of GDP for oil than we did in 1980.There is a finite amount of oil in the world, so we will eventually reach a production maximum. We have, however, a very poor track record in predicting when this will happen, and the world’s leading experts will provide only the most general guidance that it looks like we probably have several decades of production growth in front of us. Much like the British looking forward from the 1860s, we don’t have a very good idea of what the technology landscape, and much else besides, will be when or if this occurs. Almost certainly, the best course of action is the simplest: Let markets integrate this information into prices for oil and alternative energy sources, and then let entrepreneurs use this information to guide the deployment of resources through markets.