I think that this person does not know what the Jevons Paradox is. The Jevons Paradox is that increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used may increase the total amount of that resource that is used. Consuming more because costs went down isn't the Jevons paradox - it's spending more because costs went down. So if you give all your coders a great test harness and they run more tests because it takes up les…
Jevons Paradox has become a meme lately because it can be used effectively in a particular type of online argument to sound smart and checkmate the other. But as you say, the popular use is nothing mysterious, just microeconomics. At a certain level of technological development, supply and demand curves meet at a point and it yields a price. If technology develops and makes production more efficient, that crossover p…
As the cost of attention goes down, and the cost of communicating bad ideas goes down, capturing attention with bad ideas paradoxically goes up.