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Posted by martinhath 4 days ago

Reverse Jevons Paradox(mht.wtf)
56 points | 54 commentspage 2
hellojomp 19 hours ago|
> “if the cost of a resource goes up, the total spend on that resource can go down”

This is tautologically true in the limiting case of infinite cost.

bonoboTP 16 hours ago||
I thought this would be about the actual reverse effect, namely that if something gets too cheap, people don't want it anymore. Which would have been also an interesting article, regarding status symbols and luxury items.
greenfish6 23 hours ago||
Now that I think about it, it's very easy to point to reverse jevon's paradoxes. Regulations around building housing, large org bloat + processes, when the stupid form fill that i need to fill out gets too long on some website...
jaynetics 23 hours ago|
Indeed. My first thought was that this is a roundabout name for ordinary "rulebook slowdown", but of course there are other ways to increase the cost of useful behavior, not just rules.

It leads to an interesting way to think about company and civic health as well. Instead of focussing purely on incentives, one might assume that many are inclined to do good stuff anyway, and then ask: are we lowering the cost of all desired behavior as much as possible? And are we doing it for as many people as possible?

sokoloff 17 hours ago||
“If delta-x is negative, then delta-y can be positive.”

It seems like there’s a straightforward/obvious corollary that reverses the sign on both clauses. (Walk the curve in the opposing direction.)

cubefox 23 hours ago||
> If you make it hard to change code by requiring multiple levels of reviews, a web of Jira tickets, a horde of people needing to sign off, and other red tape, you might effectively kill a whole class of changes

I remember this theater on things which were suspected to be too expensive with insiffiufficient ROI to implement, except that all the time wasted by multiple people arguing in Jira tickets, sitting in meetings, and writing specifications was likely far more expensive than just building and testing the thing.

For some reason, there seems to be a strong and automatic tendency for older and larger organizations to drift toward petrification through bureaucratization.

geraneum 23 hours ago||
The author has discovered the red tape.
raincole 20 hours ago||
> if the cost of a resource goes up, the total spend on that resource can go down

... must be a satire post, right? This is just the most plain and intuition result.

malkia 23 hours ago||
Or also called bureaucracy
smitty1e 22 hours ago|
> if the cost of a resource goes up, the total spend on that resource can go down.

Not unlike hiking taxes on the rich, seeing them vote with their feet, and revenue subsequently catering.

But as long as we reward politicians for delivering blame more than results, this political folly will continue.

Until Strein's Law[1] kicks the teeth in.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Stein's_Law

neilwilson 21 hours ago|
Except that revenue doesn’t crater in a floating exchange rate system. Revenue from them craters but the money moves elsewhere and revenue improves there - including an increase in total transactions. Total revenue will always be Total spend less what people decide to financially save rather than spend. Because tax are percentages and the process is a geometric series.
AnthonyMouse 19 hours ago||
"Vote with their feet" means relocating to another jurisdiction. The other jurisdiction doesn't necessarily have to use a different currency, e.g. if businesses move from California to Texas, they both use US dollars. Likewise any two countries that both use Euros.

Moreover, when the destination jurisdiction does use a different currency, that increases demand for the destination currency and reduces demand for the original currency, i.e. it devalues the original currency. And then even if your revenue was the same in nominal dollars it would have declined in real dollars.

On top of that, non-uniform tax rates break your model wide open. The entities who leave can exchange their currency (independently of whether it gets devalued) for assets, so that the amount of currency (as distinct from wealth, since it's an equal value exchange) increases in the hands of the people who pay lower tax rates. Which likewise has a negative impact on revenue, since they pay lower tax rates.

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