Efficiency's Seduction

Jevons Paradox and Our Elegant Delusions

There are people in history who did not carry the messianic fire of Marx or the monomaniacal precision of Bentham. One such person is William Stanley Jevons, economist, logician, and an unlikely prophet of paradox. Jevons left us with an idea so elegantly destabilizing it continues to short-circuit the assumptions of modern economic thought. Its implications belong to us all: Jevons Paradox.

William Stanley Jevons was born in 1835 in Liverpool, a city then vibrating with the nervous energy of trade, coal, and empire. Raised in a merchant family, Jevons veered from commerce toward contemplation. He studied chemistry and botany before turning to political economy, where he would leave his most indelible mark. After an early stint as an assayer at the Sydney Mint in Australia, where he refined not only gold but also his philosophical bent, Jevons returned to England and immersed himself in the emerging mathematical economics that would later shape neoclassical thought.

He was a man who distrusted abstraction even as he excelled at it. His 1871 work, The Theory of Political Economy, introduced the marginal utility principle, helping formalize the calculus of decision-making in markets.

His idea: As technological innovation makes the use of a resource more efficient, the total consumption of that resource may paradoxically increase, rather than decrease. Why? Because the improved efficiency reduces the cost of using the resource, which then drives up demand. It’s a perversity, sure, like inviting a fox to guard the henhouse and finding your pantry empty the next morning. In economics, as in life, the most treacherous ideas are often the ones dressed up as common sense.

Jevons first noticed this with coal in the mid-19th century, Britain was riding the dark wave of the Industrial Revolution. Coal was not just a resource; it was the empire’s blackened artery, pumping power, soot, and dominion through the iron lungs of industry.

Engineers were celebrating the invention of more efficient steam engines, machines that could do more with less. Jevons, ever the contrarian, wasn’t applauding. In his 1865 treatise The Coal Question, he warned:

“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”

It is a warning that history has heeded only by ignoring it. Efficiency, it turns out, is an exquisite seductress. It promises of sustainability, of doing more with less, of salvation through ingenuity. But what we get, more often than not, is acceleration, faster consumption, larger scale, deeper footprints. Take the modern car. Engines are proclaimed as fuel efficient. But roads are more congested, commutes longer, vehicles bigger. We improved efficiency, only to find the problem transformed, amplified, not erased. This is exactly Jevons paradox:

“To allow commerce to proceed until the source of civilization is weakened and overturned is like killing the goose to get the golden egg. Is the immediate creation of material wealth to be our only object?”

There is something diabolically recursive about this. Every act of conservation begets consumption. Every efficiency creates the conditions for its own undoing. It’s as if the very structure of progress is booby-trapped. And the more urgently we chase sustainability through technological optimization, the more we seem to be riding the thermodynamic escalator downward, into heat, entropy, and exhaustion.

The internet is a great example, a marvel of computational efficiency. Once, a library trip took hours. Now, milliseconds. Yet the energy use of data centers and networks is skyrocketing. Streaming a movie, sending an email, mining a Bitcoin, each an act of casual efficiency, each a contribution to the quiet roar of global power demand. The digital is not sterile; it is coal and copper and cobalt, extracted and burned and buried beneath a sleek glass screen.

The Jevons Paradox is not simply an observation about economics, it is a provocation thrown at modernity’s most sacred dogmas. It cuts against the grain of Silicon Valley optimism, the techno-utopian belief that efficiency is always virtuous. It asks an impolite question: what if our most celebrated solutions are also our most elegant delusions?

There is an intellectual humor here, the kind that Jevons himself, precise, slightly melancholic, might have appreciated. His paradox is not a law, but a pattern. It does not operate with Newtonian certainty. Yet its fingerprints are everywhere: in agricultural advances that feed more mouths only to strain water tables; in LED lighting that saves watts but leads to ever-brighter, always-on cities; in AI algorithms that optimize logistics while growing the data centers that feed them like digital leviathans, humming with hunger and hidden cost.

Human Appetites

And so the paradox persists, though some argue it need not. Policy interventions, carbon taxes, regulatory caps, efficiency standards, seek to sever the link between innovation and indulgence. Whether they succeed is a matter of ideology, implementation, and time. In the cathedral of GDP, efficiency is worshipped as divine.

But to understand Jevons is to confront the darker arithmetic of modernity. It is to admit that efficiency alone cannot save us. That every technological advance is also a redistribution of burden. That our machines, no matter how smart, cannot outwit the logic of our human appetites.

Jevons remained haunted by the real-world consequences of these abstractions. His prose is that of a man standing on the edge of modernity, squinting ahead with a mix of wonder and dread. Despite his formidable intellect, Jevons struggled with melancholy and was perennially skeptical of the grand promises of progress. When he drowned off the coast of Sussex at the age of 46, it was a quiet exit for a man who had spent his life trying to make the noise of the industrial world intelligible.

If there is anything resembling a good future, it lies in the ability to imagine not just better machines, but different desires. To build economies not on the promise of doing more, but on the wisdom of needing less. Jevons didn’t live to see the full consequences of a world entranced by its own ingenuity. But he left us a question we have yet to answer: What if efficiency is not the solution we think it is, but the shadow behind the curtain?

From Smog to Sustainability

When tariffs are breaking every conceivable headline, maybe Jevons offers a solution. Jevons doesn't preach despair. He suggests, rather brutally, that behavioral shifts, not just technical ones, must do the heavy lifting. Tariffs may shape markets, but only a change in what we believe constitutes ‘enough’, instead of more, more, more, can reshape our human desires.

We need our inventions focused on the right problems. Healthcare, quality of food and improved public transportation, bicycle lanes and footpaths. Paris said au revoir to cars and air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

We need sustainable mindsets. Carefully thinking about how we live our lives.

Ingenuity brought us this far; it remains to be seen if wisdom can guide us forward.

Stay curious

Colin

Image via Wikipedia.