alt Hacker NewsFrom the article:
> Jevons Paradox: when something gets cheaper, you tend to use more of it, not less.
That's a butchering of Jevons paradox. What's stated is not a paradox, but a very natural effect. Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper.
What Jevons paradox actually describes is the situation where usage of a resource becomes more efficient (which means less of it is needed for a given task), but still the total usage of that resource increases.
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> Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper.
Sure.
But is it not also obvious that when usage of a resource becomes more efficient, the price of that ”usage” becomes cheaper?
So usage goes up obviously because efficiency increases.
It is called a paradox because some people naively think that increasing efficiency is a good way to decrease consumption.
Almost everything that is called a ”paradox” is this obvious.
Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.
> What Jevons paradox actually describes is the situation where usage of a resource becomes more efficient (which means less of it is needed for a given task), but still the total usage of that resource increases.
Why is this stated as a paradox? One simple cause is the given task being performed more than it was before because it is now cheaper (since it uses fewer resources).