3 ms·

Simple explanation: Jevons paradox is an observed correlation that has held true for certain notable industries at certain periods of history, but is not a law

• SilasX 9y ago
  But (manifestations of easily usable) energy should be the most vulnerable to Jevons effects, because it has so many potential uses that that any increase in efficiency will flip some marginal case into profitability. Ditto for lower prices.
  • nkoren 9y ago
    The problem is that energy as energy gets cheaper, it becomes an increasingly marginal part of cost of what uses energy. Eg., let's say you've got some good/service, of which energy is 10% of its lifetime operating cost. If you drop the cost of energy by 50%, then that's only a 5% cost decrease for the good. In order to generate a Jevons rebound from the perspective of the energy supplier, that 5% decrease in price would have to increase demand by more than 100%. Seems unlikely. It was a different story back in Jevons' day, when energy was a genuinely significant component of the overall cost structure of a LOT of things. But in how many goods and services is that still the case? As the cost of energy decreases relative to other cost components (like labour), you'd expect the Jevons effect to produce diminishing and eventually negative returns, no?
    • roenxi 9y ago
      You might want to reflect a bit more closely on what Jevron's paradox actually is. It is not related to the cost of the final product. Take air; it is essentially infinite and free. We use vast quantities of air in every aspect of our life. We use it in cars, in households, in computing, we breath it, we rely on their being a few km of the stuff above us to maintain pressure, etc. It is so abundant it gets a bit silly to talk about how essential it is to our way of life. Use of the stuff is almost certainly growing exponentially with population. Believe it or not, but raw electricity is more useful than air. Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available. As price goes down, usage should be spiking. Rather than Jevron's paradox being broken it is much more likely that some combination of * Supply is tightening * Real prices rising * Something is badly wrong with the economy is affoot.
      • nkoren 9y ago
        > [Jevons Paradox] It is not related to the cost of the final product. I don't believe that's correct. From the Wikipedia article: "Goods and services generally use more than one type of input (e.g. fuel, labour, machinery), and other factors besides input cost may also affect price. These factors tend to reduce the rebound effect, making the Jevons paradox less likely to occur." So the rebound effect is explicitly related to price elasticity, with the critical term being "price". If the cost of an input contributes less and less to the price of the final output, why would one expect it to have any effect? > Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available. I really don't see any evidence for that statement (and indeed the parent article is providing clear evidence to the contrary). Humans want their needs attended to, and to the degree that electricity correlates to that, they'll have an appetite for electricity. To the degree that it doesn't, they won't. Nobody actually wants to use vast amounts of electricity simply for its own sake. Moreover, there are human desires that are inversely correlated with electricity usage, such as quiet, dark skies, etc. One would expect those desires to exert a downward pressure on electricity demand even if it were completely free. It seems obvious to me that what is happening here is that in essentially any good or service you can name, non-energy costs (labour, materials, land, etc.) are becoming a much more significant component of price, both due to decreasing energy costs and increasing energy efficiency, as well as intrinsic rises in the cost of labour and materials. This in turn limits the ability for the cost of electricity to significantly stimulate or repress demand. Seems pretty straightforward.
      • notriddle 9y ago
        > Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available. That assumption could be false, though. I only want to fill my house with a certain amount of lumens before it starts hurting my eyes, and it only takes a certain amount of electricity to produce those many lumens. Maybe I could get a bigger house, but that ends up being limited by housing costs instead of electricity costs, so the cost of houses limits how much electricity I burn on lights. Or maybe TV's? Sure, a bigger TV would eat more electricity, but I can't afford an infinitely large TV, so the price of TV's limits how much electricity I use. Computers are the same way TV's are. I guess your second bullet point is true? Electricity costs are falling, but the total cost of doing stuff with electricity is going up because the gadgets are getting more expensive relative to how much power they pull.