Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reverse Jevons Paradox

mht.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–65 of 65 posts

Re: Reverse Jevons Paradox

#61

Post by m463 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #54
elil17 wrote: post #47

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…

My expertise in unrelated things tells me the dunning-kruger effect is in effect.

As the cost of attention goes down, and the cost of communicating bad ideas goes down, capturing attention with bad ideas paradoxically goes up.

Re: Reverse Jevons Paradox

#62

Post by pseudohadamard »

elil17 wrote: post #47

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…

> I think that this person does not know what the Jevons Paradox is.

Actually, Jevons Paradox is a pop-punk band from Birmingham that formed in 1997 but mostly disbanded in 2003 because of creative differences and (unofficially) the lead singers drug problems.

Not a lot of people know that.

Re: Reverse Jevons Paradox

#63

Post by deadlast2 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #54
elil17 wrote: post #47

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…

Is it just me or is this a pervasive pattern in hackernews... Someone makes a point then someone makes a contrary point and the conversation spirals off with nothing to do with the original post or concepts. I particularly notice this in more controversial posts on politics.

Re: Reverse Jevons Paradox

#64

Post by aswegs8 »

janpeuker wrote: post #18

> The cost of making small changes to the codebase is so high that it becomes net-negative for a single developer to make the change That's called Software Engineering at Google

Wait I thought the testing and release pipelines at Google are super fast?

Re: Reverse Jevons Paradox

#65

Post by dguest »

vired wrote: post #59
dguest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply and demand says when something is cheaper (or produced more efficiently), people will use more of it. But the critical part is that it doesn't say people will spend more on it. Jevon's paradox is a special case of supply and demand, where people actually end up spending more money because something is cheaper. It's interesting because consumption then grows in unpredictable ways: it can drive innovation even i…

> Jevon's paradox is a special case of supply and demand, where people actually end up spending more money because something is cheaper. No, this isn't what Jevons says. Jevons isn't concerned about money being spent on something, just total consumption of it. Whether more money or less is spent on it depends on the price elasticity of demand. Inelastic demand will lead to less money spent despite more of the resourc…

That's fair, it actually has nothing to do with money.

It's just saying that if $IN is more efficiently converted to $OUT, more $IN will be consumed.

The original paradox was $IN = coal and $OUT = work, i.e. more efficient coal use increased coal use.

With prices you have $IN = cash and $OUT = product: more efficient conversion of your cash to products can increase cash use.

I was using this special case, but indeed the more general case doesn't have to involve cash at all.

Post reply on HN