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Jevon’s paradox is a common talking point but it is not a law of nature. LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x

Jevon’s paradox is a common talking point but it is not a law of nature. LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes. The overall energy used to light homes has decreased. And even if compute demand were perfectly elastic it’s only a good thing insofar as it drives demand for new Nvidia hardware. If tokens can be served from Apple hardware or Google hardware or Huawei hardware that doesn’t help Nvidia.

kennywinker 4d ago
> LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes. I mean… some homes definitely do. You must have seen those houses that are all lit up front the outside by lawn mounted spotlights.
tonyarkles 4d ago
As I look up and see three lightbulbs side-by-side over my desk and another one in the lamp on the desk… which is dramatically more light than the old 100W bulb used but also lower energy consumption.
- omgwtfbyobbq 4d ago
  That's the rebound effect, and is fairly common. Jevons is a relatively uncommon edge case.
ethbr1 3d ago
The more apt analogy is between pre-electric and post-electric lighting (~1850 to 1920), when efficiency of light generation rapidly increased, restabilizing at ~222x as much light for the same unit of human labor. [0] Across that period, first world countries massively increased their demand for light. Further efficiency increases only matter to individual choices if they take a use case from {economically impossible} to {economically possible}. I'd offer that by the 1920s, most goings-on in first world urban environments were no longer price constrained in terms of their light usage. [0] See table 1.4, p21 https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf

kennywinker 4d ago

> LED lightbulbs use 80% less energy than incandescent but you don’t see people using 5x more lights on their homes. I mean… some homes definitely do. You must have seen those houses that are all lit up front the outside by lawn mounted spotlights.

tonyarkles 4d ago

As I look up and see three lightbulbs side-by-side over my desk and another one in the lamp on the desk… which is dramatically more light than the old 100W bulb used but also lower energy consumption.

omgwtfbyobbq 4d ago
That's the rebound effect, and is fairly common. Jevons is a relatively uncommon edge case.

ethbr1 3d ago

The more apt analogy is between pre-electric and post-electric lighting (~1850 to 1920), when efficiency of light generation rapidly increased, restabilizing at ~222x as much light for the same unit of human labor. [0] Across that period, first world countries massively increased their demand for light. Further efficiency increases only matter to individual choices if they take a use case from {economically impossible} to {economically possible}. I'd offer that by the 1920s, most goings-on in first world urban environments were no longer price constrained in terms of their light usage. [0] See table 1.4, p21 https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf