> “if the cost of a resource goes up, the total spend on that resource can go down”<p>This is tautologically true in the limiting case of infinite cost.
I can’t tell if this is a troll post or not, but either way, the concept the author seems to be looking for is called the “Law of Demand” [0].<p>0: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand</a>
> Jevons paradox happens when the cost of a resource goes down, but the total spend on that resource goes up.<p>I would argue that is not Jevons paradox but standard supply and demand (and this "reverse Jevons paradox" too). Jevons paradox occurs when a more <i>efficient</i> use of a resource leads to an increase in its use (instead of a decrease as a first order analysis would suggest).
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 <i>spend more</i> on it.<p>Jevon's paradox is a special case of supply and demand, where people actually end up <i>spending more money</i> because something is cheaper.<p>It's interesting because consumption then grows in unpredictable ways: it can drive innovation even in cases where markets are constrained by monopolies, for example, where in non-Jevons cases producers would have no incentive to lower prices.
You can rephrase it as the demand curve times the price (i.e. total spend on something vs the price) sometimes has a slope of less than -1.
So like buying the larger jar of jam that costs more than the smaller jar because the cost per ounce is less for the larger jar.
Not OP but <i>yes if</i> you consume more jam (not if you consume the same over a period of time, because you're then just paying less for jam over a wider time scale).<p>The example I've heard given is accounting and spreadsheets. It made accountancy cheaper, but people then started asking more questions and analysis became a thing.<p>Rather than just taking the reduced spend as profit, companies wound up increasing their accountancy spend overall.
Not exactly, unless you still wind up eating the larger jars at the same rate as the smaller ones.
> Jevons paradox occurs when a more efficient use of a resource leads to an increase in its use<p>I think these are the same, because efficiency is value over cost. In the original formulation of the paradox, a more efficient steam engine lead to a rise in coal consumption. You can look at this as a "money buys coal, coal drives locomotion" system, where the latter part was improved. Modulo practical issues with coal (transport, storage, etc), dropping the price of coal would (probably?) lead to the same effect, since the end result is that locomotion per money is increased. For an outside observer, it doesn't matter if you get more coal per money or more locomotion per coal.<p>> standard supply and demand<p>Standard supply and demand doesn't say anything about increase of spend. If food prices drop, I'm not going to buy more food. I might buy better food for the same budget, but there's no reason why my total food spend should increase.
> I would argue that is not Jevons paradox but standard supply and demand (and this "reverse Jevons paradox" too).<p>Kinda yes. How do you derive total spend from supply-demand curves? Multiply price and quantity at an intersection point. Likewise, you can predict total spend by multiplying p and q on the demand curve.<p>The difference in total spend is difference between these areas. For the total spend to increase with a drop in price, the the demand must rise faster.<p>Jevon's paradox implies that the price equilibrium is at the highly elastic portion of the demand curve.<p>> Jevons paradox occurs when a more efficient use of a resource leads to an increase in its use<p>While that's mostly true in practical reality in established economies, that does not strictly have to be the case. On the consumer side, especially in manufacturing, there's very little difference between unit price of a good falling and input unit per output units dropping as both lead to decreased COGS. In both cases, market realities might unlock alternative approaches (the classic being robot replacing Robert), leading to increased demand.
I think it's still valid to see this as an example of the Jevons paradox: Your resource is money, and reduced per-unit cost means you are using your money (resource) more efficiently. If the total spend now goes up instead of stagnating or decreasing, you've got Jevons
you are absolutely correct, the author is putting the cart before the horse.
Jevons Paradox is called a paradox because it is non-intuitive. It is very intuitive to conclude that when costs go up, people will use less of that thing.
I think it's a paradox in the same way that the non-reverse is. The spending might go down more than it's proportion of price increase.<p>An example not anchored in anything: If public transit costs x, I'll use it every day. If public transit suddenly costs 2x, I'm not gonna use it every other day, I'll rather find an alternative and use 0.
Will it happen to memory? I am looking at you guys, electron apps.
In micro economics theory they call this price elasticity where you try lowering the price to see how much more customers buy and you plot that to a graph calculator to get a curve and the bend on the curve is the price elasticity. Then you can calculate the optimal price to maximize sales.
> <i>you might effectively kill a whole class of changes, like "small refactor" PRs.</i><p>Or the changes might be "smuggled through" in an unrelated changeset that has to go through the red tape anyway.
> 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<p>That's called Software Engineering at Google
> if the cost of a resource goes up, the total spend on that resource can go down<p>... must be a satire post, right? This is just the most plain and intuition result.
> If you make it hard to change code by requiring multiple levels of reviews, a web of Jira tickets, a horde of people needing to sign off, and other red tape, you might effectively kill a whole class of changes<p>I remember this theater on things which were suspected to be too expensive with insiffiufficient ROI to implement, except that all the time wasted by multiple people arguing in Jira tickets, sitting in meetings, and writing specifications was likely far more expensive than just building and testing the thing.<p>For some reason, there seems to be a strong and automatic tendency for older and larger organizations to drift toward petrification through bureaucratization.
Now that I think about it, it's very easy to point to reverse jevon's paradoxes. Regulations around building housing, large org bloat + processes, when the stupid form fill that i need to fill out gets too long on some website...
Indeed. My first thought was that this is a roundabout name for ordinary "rulebook slowdown", but of course there are other ways to increase the cost of useful behavior, not just rules.<p>It leads to an interesting way to think about company and civic health as well. Instead of focussing purely on incentives, one might assume that many are inclined to do good stuff anyway, and then ask: are we lowering the cost of all desired behavior as much as possible? And are we doing it for as many people as possible?
The author has discovered the red tape.
> if the cost of a resource goes up, the total spend on that resource can go down.<p>Not unlike hiking taxes on the rich, seeing them vote with their feet, and revenue subsequently catering.<p>But as long as we reward politicians for delivering blame more than results, this political folly will continue.<p>Until Strein's Law[1] kicks the teeth in.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Stein's_Law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Stein's_Law</a>
Or also called bureaucracy
[dead]