Jevon's Paradox

Jevon's Paradox, sometimes referred to as rebound effect, is a concept used to explain that increased resource efficiency and renewable energy technology would actually cause an increase in the use of resources instead of saving it. This is due to the fact that energy saving technology increases demand for the used energy source, essentially increasing the overall energy usage. For example, in highway improvements, as roads are improved the carrying capacity of the highways increases and therefore traffic congestion increases, eventually leading to the roads needing to be repaired more often. Before personal computers were available everywhere, typewriting a document took a long time and was costly, but with the efficiency provided by computers cost to type and print a document dropped and greatly increased the amount of paper used.

Today, our society is completely dependent on consumer spending. Excessive spending and economic growth is encouraged in our economy, even if it means sacrificing natural resources and our environment, because it keeps our economy running. We have become so reliant on on excessive consumerism that if we stopped spending so much it would almost certainly lead to economic issues, if not a full economic collapse.

Filmmaker Adam Curtis describes our society as a "sea of selves". In other words people buy anything that they believe would be beneficial to themselves, without consideration of how it affects others. Our "sea of selves" is dominant and the selfish, materialistic aspect of our society is perpetuated. This idea is related to Bailey's notion of "civic" and "divine" aspects of society. "Civic" includes the individual aspects of society like rights, obligations and responsibilities, while "Divine" includes the idea that there is something more important than oneself and what the collective population does affects the world.

I think Jevon's Paradox is a very accurate description of our world today. Jeff Dardozzi's essay, "The Spector of Jevon's Paradox", does a good job of putting the paradox idea into a perspective of our modern society and gives good reasoning, excessive spending and self focused culture, for why our society has succumb to Jevon's Paradox. Veterans day is an appropriate time to observe Jevon's Paradox, since it is ironic how we celebrate the people in our military who gave their time, energy and sometimes their lives for the collective good, with our selfish, expensive way of life.