Another important thing to keep in mind: Our calculations are based on the assumption that you could have bought all these stocks at their stated offering prices.
Business failure hardly constitutes business disappearance, and the beauty of failure is that it ensures that poorly managed assets are released at frequently low prices to managers with a stated objective to develop those human, mechanical and financial inputs more effectively on the way to growth.
Crude prices have retreated somewhat after a senior OPEC official stated that the oil market was oversupplied and that Saudi Arabia has responded by cutting output.
Stated differently, if Simon was really betting that inflation-adjusted prices of a basket of commodity prices have a significantly negative trend over long periods of time, and Ehrlich was betting that the slope of that line was significantly positive, I think Simon wins the bet.
The short-term benefits of the discovery were stated (if implicitly) in the piece: a large amount of energy produced domestically at affordable prices.