The knowledge economy provides huge opportunities for economic growth and to become the cornerstone of future economic development by turning data into wisdom or human capital. Education, one aspect of the knowledge economy, exhibits a history divided into three stages: the apprenticeship era, the universal schooling era and the (future) life-long learning era. The spread of knowledge has accelerated owing to the different stages of knowledge production, in particular the printing press and now the internet.

Concerns about rising energy prices tend to occur in times of economic expansion, to disappear in times of recession. A recurring fear is that, in the long run, real energy prices will trend upwards. This paper presents evidence from five hundred years of prices of energy sources for the United Kingdom. Over this time period, there is little support for any general trend of rising fuel prices—and some evidence of significant declines. Using this information on prices and consumer expenditure to weight the series, an ‘average price of energy’ series has been created. Reflecting the substitution away from more scarce fuels (driving prices down) and towards more valuable ones (driving prices up), over more than five hundred years—and albeit with significant long-lived fluctuations—there seems little evidence of a rising long-run trend in the real price of ‘energy’.