Just as in Keynes's day, the question of finiteness is irrelevant to any contemporary
considerations, What are billiard balls made of as the joke at the head of the chapter suggests. So much
for Keynes's wisdom as an economist and a seer into the future. And if we were to make such a one percent increase
in efficiency for all uses every year, a one percent increase in demand for copper in
every future year could be accommodated without any increase in the price of copper, even
without any other helpful developments. And if Alpha adds fewer new pots and tools from year to year, the proportion of
cheap, recycled copper can rise year by year. If
there is only Alpha Crusoe and a single copper mine on an island, it will be harder to
get raw copper next year if Alpha makes a lot of copper pots and bronze tools this year,
because copper will be harder to find and dig. Yes, there are different types of materials used for billiard balls in pool, billiards, and snooker. People played this game outdoors using wooden balls.

Billiards, also known as pool, is a popular game enjoyed by people of all ages. As the game evolved, people still manufactured woody billiard balls. Ivory balls are very rare nowadays. If these old doctrines are not taught, you will have a revolution, and instead of making progress in a steady, normal fashion, you will come up to better things through storm, trouble, and sorrow. When twilight came they rose in a body and formed a huge circle over forty feet in diameter, and that circle of swallows flew around and around in the sky, around this tower, for an hour or two, making a loud twittering noise, and that attracted from other places swallows who had probably forgotten the occasion. The Dutch sport was adapted to local conditions whereby it came to be played on what were termed 'links' in the Scots language. No one knows exactly who, when or where the first billiard table was built. Note the rhetorical device embedded in the term "acknowledge" in the first sentence of
the quotation. You know this technology, call it ‘ACME product xyz’, whatever you wanna call it, there’s a gizmo that did something and here’s what happened.

We don’t know what happened to them, but we know they’re toast, they’re history, you know, you can’t fix it, gotta go get another one. This demonstrates that one needs to know history as well as technical facts, and
not just be a clever reasoner. We believe that
no one has reason to put water into the tub (as no one will put oil into an oil well), so
we figure that some peculiar accident has occurred, one that is not likely to be
repeated. But each time we return, the water level in the tub is higher than before - and
water is selling at an ever cheaper price (as oil is). THE THEORY OF DECREASING NATURAL-RESOURCE SCARCITY

People's response to the long trend of falling raw-material prices often resembles
this parody: We look at a tub of water and mark the water level. Yet when we re-examine the tub, lo and behold the
water level is higher (analogous to the price being lower) than before. So we know that things can glow without being hot.

And we know that timing because the various fire fighters would say, you know, that the dust, you know, it went up and blocked out 100% of the sunlight. NASA indicates that if a planet was on target for Earth, we'd know about it at least a decade in advance, plenty of time to stock up on doomsday t-shirts and canned goods of all kinds. And suddenly there's a man on the moon, aliens on Mars and deadly doomsday comets filled with giant flesh-eating termites headed straight towards New York City. Another scenario:
If suddenly there are not one but two people on the island, Alpha Crusoe and Gamma Defoe,
copper will be more scarce for each of them this year than if Alpha lived there alone,
unless by cooperative efforts they can devise a more complex but more efficient mining
operation - say, one man getting the surface work and one getting the shaft. Discovery of an improved mining method or of a substitute such as iron differs, in a
manner that affects future generations, from the discovery of a new lode. Even after the
discovery of a new lode, on the average it will still be more costly to obtain copper,
that is, more costly than if copper had never been used enough to lead to a "shortage."
But discoveries of improved mining methods and of substitute products can lead to lower
costs of the services people seek from copper.