Reverse Jevons Paradox

The post argues that making an activity more expensive can shrink total use of it so sharply that the total "spend" on that activity falls, then applies that idea to software work. Its concrete claim is simple: add enough friction around small code changes, forms, approvals, or compliance steps, and people stop doing a whole category of worthwhile work. The author calls this a "reverse Jevons paradox." Most people rejected the label. They said the post is mostly rediscovering price elasticity and the law of demand, plus the mundane reality of bureaucracy. Jevons, in the stricter sense, is about efficiency gains increasing total consumption of a resource. Several commenters insisted the post blurs together three different things: lower input cost, higher efficiency, and higher total spending. That distinction matters if you want the economics to mean anything beyond "people do less when you make it harder." Even so, the framing landed for some readers because it names a practical failure mode in organizations. Small actions often have thin margins. A little process cost can push them from barely worth doing to never done. The examples people reached for were tiny refactors, low-effort product fixes, quick internal improvements, and transit or housing choices that disappear once friction rises. The useful takeaway was not a new paradox. It was that teams and institutions routinely destroy good behavior by piling on fixed costs, then misread the drop in activity as lack of demand rather than bad process design.

If you are trying to increase a behavior inside a company or product, measure the small fixed costs you add around it, because they often wipe out entire classes of low-margin actions. Do not treat every catchy economics label as a new idea. Sometimes the useful move is just to recognize elasticity and cut process overhead.