William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was an English economist best known as a co-discoverer of the marginal utility theory—the greatest advance in economic thinking in the 19th century.  But he didn’t get everything right!  His study called The Coal Question (1865) suggested the folly of exploiting Britain’s coal resources in ever-increasing quantities.  He predicted that with the exhaustion of these limited reserves “we must not only cease to progress as before—we must begin a retrograde career.”  100 years later, Britain was still producing 192 million tonnes of coal per year (which was almost double the 1865 production of 102 million tonnes).  And, paradoxically, Britain’s great advancements in the 1980’s under Margaret Thatcher came about in parallel with the demise of the coal industry!