Why have the prices of natural resources gone up when we have more efficient methods of gathering them then we did 100 years ago?

Question

Why do things like wood and gas go up over the years when the world has developed way better methods and equipment for gathering and refining them?

In: 0

Answer 1

Because of inflation and also because the natural resources are not infinite there is a point where it gets more difficult and you need even more sophisticated gathering methods so you need to invest more and more on new methods.

100 years ago you had people manually scouring the rivers and they would just stumble across a 1 ounce piece of gold. Now you have absolute beast machines, burning thousands of litres of diesel moving thousands of tons of dirt until they collect enough pieces to make 1 ounce of gold