It is not how engineers estimate resources consumption but how people reacts to new situations
Welcome to this blog. This is the first post of the JEVONS project. The project aims at understanding better the rebound effect and the Jevons paradox, or why efficiency is not always effective at reducing resources consumption. The project will be focused on finding solutions, mainly from a public policies perspective to counteract or avoid it.
The first effect of resources productivity is that it reduces the use of resources per unit of output, but then, there are economic secondary effects that leads to an unexpected increase.
What is the Jevons' paradox?
In 1865, the economist William Stanley Jevons published “The Coal Question” (Jevons, 1865). In this seminal book he observed that England's consumption of coal increased after the introduction of the Watt steam engine, which improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine. He argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tended to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use. In his own words: "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." This paradox was later named after him, as “the Jevons’ Paradox”, and it still remains as one of the most widely known paradoxes in ecology, economics and sustainability.
The intuition behind this effect is that an increase in the efficiency of using a given resource (e.g. energy) reduces the unitary cost of the service it provides (e.g. transportation), from which follows an increase in its demand and the consequent offsetting of some or all of the initial expected savings.
I will keep you posted.
Jaume