How Julian Simon and Dionysius Lardner Proved the Doomsday Alarmists Wrong

Eager to demonstrate the value of an historical perspective as to why, in a functioning market economy, people are unlikely to ever run out of resources, Simon once urged pessimistic analysts to learn "from the great economist [William Stanley] Jevons' scholarly 1865 prediction of cessation of growth for England by 1900 due to lack of fuel" and to remember Jevons' dismissal of petroleum as a potential substitute for coal.