Ratios, first post

In my essay (see the Oil1859 website), I talk a bit about return ratios.  I need to elaborate on that concept, because it's fundamental to understanding the elaborate structure of modern industrial societies.  In pre-industrial societies that depend on people and animals performing labor to produce food, raw materials, and finished products, not much complexity is possible.  A bit more complexity is possible when you can use wind or water energy to operate simple machines and sailing vessels.

The basis of the industrial revolution was coal.  A generation of machines was devised that burned coal to heat water into steam; the steam engine.  Societies grew more layers and got more complex.  I don't know what the return ratio was for digging up coal and burning it, but I'm sure it was intermediate between the return ratio of horses and the 15 to 1 return ratio of oil production.  The cornerstone of modern societies is electricity which powers all manner of machines attached to the electrical grid and oil-based fuels which power almost everything not attached to the grid.  The electricity is mostly produced by burning coal and natural gas, but digging up the coal and drilling the gas wells depends mostly on machines that burn petroleum fuels.  So the return ratio on oil production affects everything else.

To bring this back to society, look around you and ask yourself how many people you know that actually grow, mine, or make something.  Not many, probably.  My home state Arizona had about 2.855 million people at work at the end of 2009.  Arizona is the country's major copper producer and a significant source of timber, yet only 10,800 people are employed in mining and logging.  I've been told 7000 of those are miners.  That's only possible because mines depend on enormous oil-powered machines to dig and move the ore, controlled by a relative handful of people.  This in a state where most people worked in mines at the beginning of the 20th century.  159,000 people work in manufacturing jobs, and 132,00 people work in constuction.  443,500 people work in agriculture because Arizona is a huge agricultural exporter.  So that's 745,300 people you could argue produce something.  In contrast, 2,109,500 people work in service sector and transportation jobs.  Cheap oil allows a huge superstructure of "service economy" to be built on a small base of producer jobs.  As the cost of oil rises, the effect will be twofold.  People will spend less money on nonessential goods and services.  Human labor will become more valuable relative to fuel costs (no more weed-whackers...).

So how will the job structure shift as the service economy deflates?  More people will be probably be needed to grow food if there are fewer machines in the fields.  Will there be pickaxes in mines again?  Who will start the companies to do the work and how will they get the money to pay people?  A plan or two would be helpful.