Jevons Paradox: A Personal Perspective

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17 points·kiyanwang··8 comments

> When you get more productive, leisure's opportunity costs skyrocket. Every pause carries an invisible price tag that flickers in your peripheral vision.

I'd love it if this turns out that this single concept has already been given a name by somebody somewhere.

> When an hour of work generates what once took days, rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience. Every pause carries an invisible price tag that flickers in your peripheral vision.

So yeah but only if you get paid by the hour. I have a fixed salary, I don’t work on weekends - so I’m not spending every hour Saturday thinking “gee I’m wasting such a huge amount of money just sitting here watching the birds”

opportunity cost comes to mind

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

Of course it has.

HN is filled with hundreds of links to individual blogs rediscovering Econ 101 and Econ 201 concepts every week.

> Traditional economics might predict that AI-boosted productivity would reduce working hours, a four-day weekend for tasks that once took five days.

The funny thing is, there have been precedents: invention of typewriters/telephones, then computerization, then the Internet, — and the work only ever expanded. And now there is AI. Well, you know, what they say: when you've got a willing horse, whip it for another ten miles; surely this works with human workers as well.

Reminds me of Bertrand Russell and his essay In Praise of Idleness

https://files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%2...

All I can think of is this analysis

https://components.one/posts/gamer-and-nihilist-product-hunt

"like watching gold-threaded potential slip through your fingers into a river."

um, ok

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