202411292305 Rebound Effect

Also known as the Jevon’s paradox or The Coal Problem. Initially formulated as

Why did coal consumption not drop when engines became more efficient?

The answer is that people did more work with those engines and had the same “cost homeostasis”. That is, they were always willing to spend that amount on coal or put up with that amount of “cost” whether monetary or labor or whatever, so when the engine got more efficient they adjusted their consumption to meet that new equilibrium.

This concept was introduced to me through the excellent talk from Peter van Hardenberg from Ink and Switch titled Why Can’t We Make Simple Software (23:29 cite this and maybe even make a source for it. It’s a really great talk #wip) In it, he discusses our threshold for tolerating complexity and how we’ll put up with it in a system until it crosses that threshold. Once it does, we’ll make the changes needed to bring it back under the threshold and repeat this cycle.

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