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I always roll my eyes at Jevons' Paradox. It's just an idea of how things might be. There's no a priori reason to believe that it will actually happen in any re

I always roll my eyes at Jevons' Paradox. It's just an idea of how things might be. There's no a priori reason to believe that it will actually happen in any real scenario just because an economist described this concept a hundred years ago.

philipkglass 3y ago
It's an observed thing. It's notable as a paradox because it's counterintuitive and less common than the intuitively obvious outcome. The irksome thing about it is when people proclaim an assured Jevons Paradox in advance. Its instances are knowable only with hindsight.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Exactly, in technology we constantly talk about disruption and how we all want to develop the next disruptive industry to strike it rich. Each disruption is a paradigm shift, a kind of event horizon that you can only determine the effects of after you pass it. Now we're watching the potential for one of the bigger disruptions in history and attempting to make predictions with authority. Very few will even be close to correct and those will only be near by the shear probabilistic outcome of so many predictions being made.
perrygeo 3y ago
In the energy world, it's been observed countless times on many different scales and timeframes. Every single item in the typical American household has seen huge improvements in efficiency in my lifetime (lightbulbs, fridges, heat pumps, to name the most prominent) but the average consumption of electricity has increased in that time. It's really quite intuitive - calling it a "paradox" is a disservice to the simplicity of the idea. If an energy-intensive technology exists and is generally useful, there will be some demand for it. If there is enough demand, market forces will invest in efficiency which drives down the total cost of ownership. And when prices go down, demand increases. Framed this way, it would be hard to imagine a case where the market put forth the effort to make a technology more efficient and it failed to drive up demand. It's an inevitable consequence of market economics - hardly what one would call a "paradox".

philipkglass 3y ago

It's an observed thing. It's notable as a paradox because it's counterintuitive and less common than the intuitively obvious outcome. The irksome thing about it is when people proclaim an assured Jevons Paradox in advance. Its instances are knowable only with hindsight.

pixl97 3y ago
Exactly, in technology we constantly talk about disruption and how we all want to develop the next disruptive industry to strike it rich. Each disruption is a paradigm shift, a kind of event horizon that you can only determine the effects of after you pass it. Now we're watching the potential for one of the bigger disruptions in history and attempting to make predictions with authority. Very few will even be close to correct and those will only be near by the shear probabilistic outcome of so many predictions being made.

perrygeo 3y ago

In the energy world, it's been observed countless times on many different scales and timeframes. Every single item in the typical American household has seen huge improvements in efficiency in my lifetime (lightbulbs, fridges, heat pumps, to name the most prominent) but the average consumption of electricity has increased in that time. It's really quite intuitive - calling it a "paradox" is a disservice to the simplicity of the idea. If an energy-intensive technology exists and is generally useful, there will be some demand for it. If there is enough demand, market forces will invest in efficiency which drives down the total cost of ownership. And when prices go down, demand increases. Framed this way, it would be hard to imagine a case where the market put forth the effort to make a technology more efficient and it failed to drive up demand. It's an inevitable consequence of market economics - hardly what one would call a "paradox".