Posts Tagged jevons

There are many fascinating blogs out there on the subject of business efficiency and I have to praise one of them – the nice people at the Dachis Group – by way of stealing their idea.

The blog explains the premise of Jevons paradox, named after William Stanley Jevons in the picture above. It states that, as we find more efficient ways of using a resource, we end up using more rather than less. The example quoted is coal: the more efficient steam engines became, the more people were impelled to mine coal from the ground to fire these increasingly desirable machines. Thus the amount of coal used went up, not down, despite the efficiency gains.

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