Some observers like to see Easter Island as a metaphor for the modern world. However, it is important to be aware of the differences. The first point, as has been emphasized already, is that societies of the Easter Island type do not necessarily have a dramatic decline. In the case of Easter Island, the civilization […]

It is useful to consider the history of Easter Island after the 18th century. The story is a very sad one— much worse than the endogenous boom-and-bust cycle that had already occurred on Easter Island. From the time of James Cook in the late 18th century through the mid-19th century, conditions on Easter Island gradually […]

A presumption underlying the analysis here is that property rights were incomplete, perhaps not to the point of full open access, but at least to the point where it was hard to prevent increased harvesting as the population increased. Specifically, in Eq. (1) harvesting is assumed to be increasing with popula­tion size for any given […]

Perhaps the most revealing method of analysis of this dynamic system is through simulation. It is possible to estimate plausible values for the parameters in Eqs. (1) and (2) and simulate the evolution of Easter Island. The necessary parameters are a, b, n, r, and environmental carrying capacity K. It is also neces­sary to specify […]

To describe population growth, we adopt the linear form used by Lotka and Volterra in their original predator-prey formulations. The first component is a base net fertility rate, n, that would apply in the absence of a resource stock (and would presumably be negative in our environment). In addition, there is a second term that, […]

The natural growth of the forest stock provides part of the story in characterizing the evolution of the forest stock. The other part of the story depends on the harvesting behavior of the Easter Islanders. The key economic point is that under conditions of incomplete property rights, it is natural to expect that, for any […]

The logistic growth function is no doubt far from being a perfect approximation to the growth of the Jubaea chilensis forest on Easter Island. Various extensions to the logistic growth function are possible. For example, it is quite possible that at very low values of the stock, the proportional growth rate actually tends to decline. […]

The starting point for describing the evolution of a renewable resource stock is the logistic growth function. Using t to denote time, a simple logistic growth function has the form G(t) = rS(1—S/K). The variable r is the intrinsic growth rate and K is the environmental carrying capacity, or maximum pos­sible size of the resource […]