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William Stanley Jevons was one of the greatest economists of the 19th century. With Menger and Walras he was one of the three co-discoverers of marginal utility theory, the idea that as we consume more of something the value of each incremental unit diminishes. We value a glass of water to stop us dying of thirst much more than the same glass to help top up our swimming pools. However, he fell into the Malthusian trap in The Coal Question (1865). In this influential book he treated coal as the essential resource for the British industrial economy and argued that it was exhaustible. He worried about "our present rapid multiplication when brought into comparison with a fixed amount of material resource" and feared that Britain's industrial growth would come to a halt because its coal reserves were running out. Worse still he argued "... it is useless the think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal." "... some day our coal seams [may] be found emptied to the bottom, and swept clean like a coal-cellar. Our fires and furnaces ... suddenly extinguished, and cold and darkness ... left to reign over a depopulated country."Jevons, William Stanley. [1865, 1906] 1965. The Coal Question. New York: Click here to learn more about Jevons |
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