● New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars
Rainer Zitelmann
Review via Real Clear Markets
“Space Economics” has only recently become a thing. Economics is the science of scarcity. Where there is scarcity, there is economics. “Scarcity,” in an economic sense, means that a resource satisfies a human want, but there is not enough of it to satisfy all of those potential wants. So we need to figure out a way to allocate ownership and/or usage rights over the resource. Who gets to use it, how much of it, and in what way?
What counts as a “scarce resource,” in an economic sense, changes over time. It depends, among other things, on our technological possibilities. Oil was not a scarce resource until we figured out how to make use of it: it was just a black liquid which nobody wanted, so the question of how we should allocate property rights over oil wells was not especially relevant. Then oil became “black gold,” and all of a sudden, it mattered hugely.