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Huh? Why would the demand curve for lighting not be “funky”? If someone offered to pay for all of your home lighting, no matter how much power your lighting t
by drdeca 2y ago
Huh?
Why would the demand curve for lighting not be “funky”?
If someone offered to pay for all of your home lighting, no matter how much power your lighting took, how much lighting would you get? Presumably a bounded amount! But in this case, the price you are paying for power for lighting is zero. So, reducing the energy use per amount of lighting would presumably not increase the amount of lighting you use beyond this limit, and therefore would decrease the energy you use for lighting.
Where’s the hole in this argument?
- roenxi 2y ago> Where’s the hole in this argument? The unrealistic assumptions - the argument started by assuming that resources are unlimited. Most of economics is expected to break down from that starting point. The point of all the models is theorising about how people will distribute limited resources. It is like talking about the market for air or trying to measure its supply/demand curves. They are completely degenerate because it is too abundant for anything meaningful to be said.
- drdeca 2y agoThe unrealistic assumption of someone offering to pay the part of your electricity bill that comes from lighting, no matter how big? Ok, yes, that’s clearly unrealistic, but, the cost of this presumably wouldn’t be like, totally insane, right? Of course, I don’t mean that in realistic scenarios that the amount of energy used for lighting would decrease directly by the proportion given by the increase in efficiency of light-per-power, which would only happen if you had exactly no demand for more lighting than you have even if it was free, but that doesn’t mean the energy used would necessarily increase, just that it wouldn’t decrease as much as it would if you consumed the same amount of lighting.