Hacker News Reader

Comment by cseleborg | Hacker News Reader

> This is why technology is brilliant. It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation.

But that's not what happens in practice. There is this paradox, the name of which I forget, which says that the more efficiently we use a resource, the more we is it in absolute terms. We never really freed up any leisure time when we introduced household appliances or when productivity went up. Cars became both more fuel-efficient but also heavier, so we burn more fuel. Smartphones have gotten really good at managing power, making them a viable choice for plenty of activities throughout the day, thus increasing their total energy consumption.

Personally, I just don't believe more efficient tech will help reduce our power consumption. It will require either a completely different tech that doesn't require electricity or fuel to run, or a change in societal habits.

View on HN

"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It is interesting they consider it a paradox. When the demand curves show it. As making something more efficient moves the supply curve around (and moves where MR=MC is). Or in econ 250 class speak 'shift the supply curve right'. I think the 'paradox' comes in where they do not consider there is more demand on the other side of lower prices? Not all goods goto infinity on cost vs demand curve. But some sure act like it.

I guess the "paradox" or counterintuitive part comes in situations when the price elasticities are such that a 10% efficiency gain (or price cut) would result in >10% increase in demand and hence in final spending.

Another part may be that non-economists (and even lots of students who succesfully passed econ 101) don't think about shifting demand or supply curves. In my experience, most people who remember the textbook supply-demand curves only think about moving along the curves (which makes the classic diagrams pretty crappy pedagogical devices IMO).

agreed. 1 to 1 would be an interesting result and probably a linear set of curves. But some curves look more like log scales so the effect depending on the slope of the curve could be wildly more or less.

I agree the classic diagrams are kind of crappy. As usually they are very simple just for demonstration. But to make both of those curves is usually more like a N dimensional curve. But remembering back on my econ classes I took they were excited about point slope formulas and maybe a mix of linear algebra in the advanced classes. Which was amusing from the CS/Math background which was my major.

In urban planning there's the 'law of induced demand' that has parallels to this and shows the paradoxical nature. When a road starts to see congestion, the reaction in the past has been to add lanes, widen the road, and/or increase the speed limit to get more cars through faster. This has its intended effect in the short term, but makes the road more attractive to drivers. More drivers start using the particular road, exceeding the planned capacity and in the average case causing worst congestion than existed before.

> There is this paradox, the name of which I forget

It's called the Rebound Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

I'm not sure about your general point - people definitely use more things as they become cheaper, which is a good thing IMO, but you're right that this means power consumption doesn't necessarily go down with lowering costs.

But just to add another dimension to the discussion, there's an interesting book I've heard about, the thesis of which is basically that technology has made a lot of material goods much more efficient. E.g. they give the example of aluminum soda cans - nowadays, the cans themselves use much less material than 50 years ago - using modern production technology, using CAD systems to design them better, etc. has led to a lot less material wastage (I think it was like 25% or something like that, but I'm not sure).

And in general, from the point of view of the companies selling material goods, the less material and more efficiently produced materials the better, since that's a direct cost, meaning they are in general working to make everything a lot more efficient.

Eh, I’m not so convinced that the relationship is direct - Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but I’m not convinced the two are necessarily linked.

I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.

"I spend roughly the same amount of time..." the paradox works if you define usage as energy consumption, not time spent.

20 years ago, you were not streaming 1080p videos or downloading 50 GB video games. Even kids do that on a regular basis now and a bigger share of the population worldwide has access to similar services

No, but I was torrenting those movies to my seedbox which was on 24/7.

IMO I don’t think usage scales to power consumption - this sounds like correlation vs causation to me. It sounds like use has also increased while efficiency has increased, not one because of the other (ie I would personally still be streaming the same number of movies if my AppleTV used twice the power, and if they release a new version that doubles the energy efficiency that won’t cause me to watch more)

With a lot of these arguments (including for example the Unabomber manifesto), I wonder if we're not projecting our own behavior on technology, because we see the effects so easily when looking outward rather than inward.

Technology just is. How it's used makes the difference, and that stems from our way of living in the world. Any tool can be used for both "good" and "bad", however you define those.

I think we tend to prioritize our own desires above anything else, because "someone else" might do that and gain an advantage over "us". We're largely stuck in survival mode, rather than an abundance mindset where we take a step back and reflect on what the goal is, and what is needed to achieve that goal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com