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It seems similar to anecdata as the US migrated from dialup to broadband internet services. In theory you could finish downloading everything you needed in a fr

It seems similar to anecdata as the US migrated from dialup to broadband internet services. In theory you could finish downloading everything you needed in a fraction of the time so the bandwidth should remain unused longer. In practice, people started downloading everything. I just need this Linux distribution but here's a dozen more I can now get in minutes and try out that were prohibitive to download before to experiment with but now aren't. People started downloading video game demos like crazy, setup file servers on their home systems, etc. It turns out the new efficiencies tend to be quickly gobbled up by existing processes that were stonewalled before. As long as there are problems bound by some technological constraint, any efficiency gains disappear rapidly as they're quickly integrated into existing or new processes. You didn't use that much bandwidth before because it was scarce but now you have a firehydrant so let's see what we can use. Humans are pretty great at quickly finding ways to gobble up and expand resources whenever they're found. Once you break one of those barriers it may be that the other barriers weren't as unsormountable which leads to rapid rise in demand. That's been my 2 cents.

slg 5y ago
I think that would fall under a slightly different but very similar concept know as induced demand. Basically that occurs when an increase in supply leads to an increase in demand. Roads are the most commons example of induced demand. Adding new roads rarely decreases travel times because new roads encourage more people to drive which leads to more traffic that soaks up any benefit the new roads added. The impact is the same regardless of whether the supply increase is real in a quantifiable way or whether the actual amount is fixed but the same quantity is able to satisfy more buyers due to an increase in efficiency. Your example is more induced demand because we weren't making more efficient use of existing bandwidth. More bandwidth was now being supplied which caused demand to also increase.
- makeworld 5y ago
  It seems like Jevons Paradox is just another example of induced demand, the demand is just induced due to increased efficiency. Roads and bandwidth can be structured as a Jevons Paradox as well, no? The roads were made more efficient by being able to transport more cars. The Internet connection was made more efficient by allowing more bandwidth.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    "Induced demand" usually happens when the product you are supplying is free, like roads. What you are talking is more like latent demand.
  - slg 5y ago
    I think the difference is a real vs nominal increase in supply. Is the quantity of supply higher or is the supply just being used more efficiently? It is the difference between roads being added and the speed limit being increased. Lots of topics in economics are talked about as if they occur in isolation, but that rarely happens in practice. The bandwidth example includes both because we were increasing efficiency of existing data lines as well as adding more lines, but I think the latter was much more impactful than the former.
  - kiba 5y ago
    Cars are just very space inefficient compared to motorcycle, bicycles, or even pedestrians, though. Saturation comes much faster for cars, so it's more efficient to use rail and other form of transport.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      They are very time efficient, though, and people tend to care about time efficiency too, not just about space efficiency.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        But the space inefficiency forces time inefficiency rather quickly ( because cars take so much space, it's relatively easy for them to be enough to create traffic and/or parking congestion). Not to mention the fact that all of the space dedicated to fit the space inefficient cars is wasted, and wastes time for humans ( e.g. when having to cross a huge stroad or parking lot).
      - MereInterest 5y ago
        Time efficiency, maybe, but time utilization definitely not. Based on current times from Google Maps, driving from New York City to Boston is 3h45m. Taking a Greyhound bus is 4h20m, but you can read a book, play video games, etc during that time. One of them uses the majority of your attention for the full duration, while the other uses barely any of your attention, leaving you free to do something else. And that's not even counting trains, which would make the same trip in 3h30m.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Roads are the most commons example of induced demand. Adding new roads rarely decreases travel times because new roads encourage more people to drive which leads to more traffic that soaks up any benefit the new roads added. The problem with "induced demand" is that it's misnamed. It's really suppressed demand. Suppose you have a congested road. It has two lanes and currently has enough traffic to require three lanes. So you add a third lane. Then you turn around and it's congested again. Because the congestion suppresses demand. The third lane relieved some of the congestion which increased use. To satisfy the demand that exists when there isn't any congestion, you would need four lanes. But not necessarily five, because once the congestion is gone, adding more lanes doesn't make it any more gone. If you built a twenty lane road there, traffic to fill it wouldn't just magically appear. (China has done the experiment.) This is important because it applies to anything else you want to use to relieve the congestion. "Don't build more roads, that's induced demand. The only solution is more mass transit." But if you build the mass transit and it removes one lane worth of traffic from the road, that's the same result as adding the third lane. Which isn't enough for the same reason -- the reduction in congestion increases use of the road. Because the demand isn't being induced by a wider road, it's being suppressed by the existing congestion. The internet speeds are a great example. In the dial up days, the low speed heavily suppressed demand. Your connection was pretty much maxed out whenever you were using it. Now connections are 1000 times faster or more and we use what, 20 times more bandwidth? Maybe 100 times? The speed increases outpaced the usage increases. It's possible to do that.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    > But if you build the mass transit and it removes one lane worth of traffic from the road, that's the same result as adding the third lane. Mass transit can handle much more than one lane worth of traffic.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      > Mass transit can handle much more than one lane worth of traffic. It's not about how many people you can physically fit on a train car. They all have to be going the same way or it doesn't work. There could be one lane worth of people who are doing that and the others are going to thousands of different places.
- anamax 5y ago
  In the roads case, the demand was always there. Increased capacity means that more demand is satisfied, even if the QoS for the satisfied demand went up. Consider the person who lived close to work because commuting wasn't possible. With increased capacity, living elsewhere becomes an option. They wouldn't exercise that option unless they preferred it. That demand predates the availability of the option.
  - adamjb 5y ago
    That's just the paradoxical thing about it though. With induced demand congestion doesn't improve so travel times don't improve, so there is the same (dis)benefit to moving as there was before and living elsewhere doesn't, or rather shouldn't, become an option.
    - beerandt 5y ago
      Yet additional demand is still being satisfied, even if QoS returns to a certain equilibrium. The problem is that the added capacity still isn't sufficient to satisfy the extant demand of people wanting to get to town.
taneq 5y ago
How long did that trend last, though? It sounds to me a bit like the way people who've grown up during a famine often keep heavily stocked food stores at all times. Barring industry-driven changes like video streaming and other content delivery mechanisms, I bet the average 18-year-old downloads far less today than the average 18-year-old a decade ago. Why download and store everything when you can just get it later if you need it? (On the flip side it's always funny when driving with younger colleagues and they announce that the music might get choppy because mobile reception is patchy. I tend to explain in a Princess Bride grandpa voice about how once upon a time Spotify was called mp3s and it worked even without mobile data.)
ip26 5y ago
I remember a time where I kept that DSL link saturated, because there was enough bandwidth to download anything I wanted, but it might take twelve hours. With fiber, I can download just about anything in seconds, and as a result I don't download anything until I actually need it. Over-abundance has the upside that there is no need to over-consume, as there is in the case of a generous but still limited resource. Of course, on the other hand, over-abundance easily leads to excessive waste, which is where metering plays a role. Even for a very cheap resource.
env123 5y ago
1 word: greed

slg 5y ago

I think that would fall under a slightly different but very similar concept know as induced demand. Basically that occurs when an increase in supply leads to an increase in demand. Roads are the most commons example of induced demand. Adding new roads rarely decreases travel times because new roads encourage more people to drive which leads to more traffic that soaks up any benefit the new roads added. The impact is the same regardless of whether the supply increase is real in a quantifiable way or whether the actual amount is fixed but the same quantity is able to satisfy more buyers due to an increase in efficiency. Your example is more induced demand because we weren't making more efficient use of existing bandwidth. More bandwidth was now being supplied which caused demand to also increase.

makeworld 5y ago
It seems like Jevons Paradox is just another example of induced demand, the demand is just induced due to increased efficiency. Roads and bandwidth can be structured as a Jevons Paradox as well, no? The roads were made more efficient by being able to transport more cars. The Internet connection was made more efficient by allowing more bandwidth.
- imtringued 5y ago
  "Induced demand" usually happens when the product you are supplying is free, like roads. What you are talking is more like latent demand.
- slg 5y ago
  I think the difference is a real vs nominal increase in supply. Is the quantity of supply higher or is the supply just being used more efficiently? It is the difference between roads being added and the speed limit being increased. Lots of topics in economics are talked about as if they occur in isolation, but that rarely happens in practice. The bandwidth example includes both because we were increasing efficiency of existing data lines as well as adding more lines, but I think the latter was much more impactful than the former.
- kiba 5y ago
  Cars are just very space inefficient compared to motorcycle, bicycles, or even pedestrians, though. Saturation comes much faster for cars, so it's more efficient to use rail and other form of transport.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    They are very time efficient, though, and people tend to care about time efficiency too, not just about space efficiency.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      But the space inefficiency forces time inefficiency rather quickly ( because cars take so much space, it's relatively easy for them to be enough to create traffic and/or parking congestion). Not to mention the fact that all of the space dedicated to fit the space inefficient cars is wasted, and wastes time for humans ( e.g. when having to cross a huge stroad or parking lot).
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      Time efficiency, maybe, but time utilization definitely not. Based on current times from Google Maps, driving from New York City to Boston is 3h45m. Taking a Greyhound bus is 4h20m, but you can read a book, play video games, etc during that time. One of them uses the majority of your attention for the full duration, while the other uses barely any of your attention, leaving you free to do something else. And that's not even counting trains, which would make the same trip in 3h30m.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Roads are the most commons example of induced demand. Adding new roads rarely decreases travel times because new roads encourage more people to drive which leads to more traffic that soaks up any benefit the new roads added. The problem with "induced demand" is that it's misnamed. It's really suppressed demand. Suppose you have a congested road. It has two lanes and currently has enough traffic to require three lanes. So you add a third lane. Then you turn around and it's congested again. Because the congestion suppresses demand. The third lane relieved some of the congestion which increased use. To satisfy the demand that exists when there isn't any congestion, you would need four lanes. But not necessarily five, because once the congestion is gone, adding more lanes doesn't make it any more gone. If you built a twenty lane road there, traffic to fill it wouldn't just magically appear. (China has done the experiment.) This is important because it applies to anything else you want to use to relieve the congestion. "Don't build more roads, that's induced demand. The only solution is more mass transit." But if you build the mass transit and it removes one lane worth of traffic from the road, that's the same result as adding the third lane. Which isn't enough for the same reason -- the reduction in congestion increases use of the road. Because the demand isn't being induced by a wider road, it's being suppressed by the existing congestion. The internet speeds are a great example. In the dial up days, the low speed heavily suppressed demand. Your connection was pretty much maxed out whenever you were using it. Now connections are 1000 times faster or more and we use what, 20 times more bandwidth? Maybe 100 times? The speed increases outpaced the usage increases. It's possible to do that.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > But if you build the mass transit and it removes one lane worth of traffic from the road, that's the same result as adding the third lane. Mass transit can handle much more than one lane worth of traffic.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Mass transit can handle much more than one lane worth of traffic. It's not about how many people you can physically fit on a train car. They all have to be going the same way or it doesn't work. There could be one lane worth of people who are doing that and the others are going to thousands of different places.
anamax 5y ago
In the roads case, the demand was always there. Increased capacity means that more demand is satisfied, even if the QoS for the satisfied demand went up. Consider the person who lived close to work because commuting wasn't possible. With increased capacity, living elsewhere becomes an option. They wouldn't exercise that option unless they preferred it. That demand predates the availability of the option.
- adamjb 5y ago
  That's just the paradoxical thing about it though. With induced demand congestion doesn't improve so travel times don't improve, so there is the same (dis)benefit to moving as there was before and living elsewhere doesn't, or rather shouldn't, become an option.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    Yet additional demand is still being satisfied, even if QoS returns to a certain equilibrium. The problem is that the added capacity still isn't sufficient to satisfy the extant demand of people wanting to get to town.

taneq 5y ago

How long did that trend last, though? It sounds to me a bit like the way people who've grown up during a famine often keep heavily stocked food stores at all times. Barring industry-driven changes like video streaming and other content delivery mechanisms, I bet the average 18-year-old downloads far less today than the average 18-year-old a decade ago. Why download and store everything when you can just get it later if you need it? (On the flip side it's always funny when driving with younger colleagues and they announce that the music might get choppy because mobile reception is patchy. I tend to explain in a Princess Bride grandpa voice about how once upon a time Spotify was called mp3s and it worked even without mobile data.)

ip26 5y ago

I remember a time where I kept that DSL link saturated, because there was enough bandwidth to download anything I wanted, but it might take twelve hours. With fiber, I can download just about anything in seconds, and as a result I don't download anything until I actually need it. Over-abundance has the upside that there is no need to over-consume, as there is in the case of a generous but still limited resource. Of course, on the other hand, over-abundance easily leads to excessive waste, which is where metering plays a role. Even for a very cheap resource.

env123 5y ago

1 word: greed