Jevons Paradox
William Stanley Jevons was a 19th century English economist and logician. He made extensive contributions to the field, yet is perhaps best known for his eponymous paradox. Jevons Paradox arises when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing unit consumption), but the falling marginal cost of use induces increases in demand such that aggregate resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Engineers are, in general terms, believers in the benefits of technology. Efficiency gains are professed to solve any number of social and environmental ills. E.g., autonomous vehicles will solve traffic congestion and improved safety through their elimination of fallible human drivers. Consider the narrative regarding the population theory of another late 18th century/early 19th century economist - Thomas Malthus. Malthus predicted population collapse in response to population growth outstripping agricultural productivity growth. Thus far, his prediction has not come to pass partially due to technological progressing, including the 20th century Green Revolution (led by Norman Borlaug and others), which relieved starvation concerns - yay! Techno-optimists reference this success as an exemplar of why technology will save us. Furthermore, the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve (named for yet another economist, Simon Kuznets) anticipates GDP becoming decoupled from environmental impacts as a nation moves from an industrial to a post-industrial economy.
Let us take a look at the Kuznets Curve in the context of Jevons Paradox. If we assume a steady state economy, then it may be the case that environmental impacts will decrease as a function of technological progress. By a steady state economy, we mean a constant stock of capital and fixed population.
Of course, we do not exist in a steady state economy, global population continues to grow (rising from 6 billiong to 8 billion people in my own lifetime). While natural resources are a fixed stock (we will return to this topic on many occassions), our rate of resource consumption has not declined as a function of technological progress. Rather, we continue to consume increasing quantities of materials and energy, which represent the fundamental building blocks of human society. Another way to term a steady state economy is that its size is a non-stationary function of time. Stationarity will be a familiar term to those with a background in statistics or econometrics - refering to the lack of equilibrium about a fixed level of resource consumption in this case. With GDP encouraged to grow without limit, Jevons Paradox quickly comes to bear. Technological progress will get us only so far when faced with the tasks of overcoming a non-stationarity system.
We can consider the problem from the perspective of aggregate environmental impact vs. marginal (unit) environmental impact. Jevons Paradox shows us that individuals will increase their environment impacts (vis-a-vis more consumption) in response to technological innovations that reduce the marginal cost, or material and energy requirements - i.e., increasing aggregate individual impacts. At the same time, additional individuals (i.e., population growth) compounds the impacts, even should these new individuals consume resources at a diminished rate.
So what can be done? The first step is to recognize myopia in our collective perspective on resource consumption as engineers, economists, policy-makers, and inhabitants of this planet. Classical valuation methods cannot account for these impacts, at least as long as they exist within an epistemology founded in growth as a positive property of human society rather than as a normative value.
I hope to continue to examine these topics in greater depth, not for professional promotion (unlikely absent a large grant to build ecological philosophy widgets with my graduate students) but rather for personal edification and sanity. I would like to reflect on value systems, morality, and social change. I am also interested in teasing out the seeming intangibles of the engineering perspective on policy evaluation from the conventional economics-based approach, and how engineering has been drawn into the economics perspective through a lack of appropriate application of relevant theory and knowledge - e.g., entropy, biophysical limits, and system dynamics.