You said: "Mathematically speaking efficiency gains should actually involve people using more electricity [1] because there if it was worth spending that much money for X stuff now it makes even more sense because you can get >X stuff."

And that doesn't happen at all with light bulbs. The cheapness caused a mild increase in lighting, but people are using way less electricity on lights now.

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roenxi 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, sure. They might use more electricity for lighting or less. How much electricity gets used for lighting isn't really the point here. More electricity gets used.

Seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox has a pretty good explanation. This isn't a new effect, it's been an established consideration related to energy efficiency since the 1850s.

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Dylan16807 8 hours ago | parent [-]

If light bulbs get more efficient, and someone uses more electricity on something else, that's not Jevon's paradox, that's a coincidence because there's a million things using electricity and some go up and some go down. There's no significant causal relationship between the two. (Mostly little fluctuations in electric prices that even out over the years as supply is built to match demand.)

Jevon's paradox is when a specific use case gets more efficient, so you do more of that use case, so much so that the extra use overwhelms the efficiency. It happens in many situations but definitely not all. You have a curve between how much you use and how much value you get, and the steepness of that curve decides Jevon's. For lighting in the past few decades, there's no Jevon's. The changes in light bulbs have caused a big reduction in electricity use. If we were stuck on incandescents we'd be using a lot more electricity total.

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roenxi 7 hours ago | parent [-]

And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption. Energy is an absolutely classic field where it improvements in efficiency isn't a likely cause for dropping use. There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.

The UK doesn't look like it is experiencing an efficiency utopia; it looks like it has a relatively poor population among the developed countries (per capita) and they're suffering from an advanced energy shortage. The costs appear to be going crazy, they're deindustrialising. That isn't efficiency. It looks like they ran out of coal and are suffering from an energy squeeze.

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Dylan16807 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> And then the article discusses that even if Jevons paradox doesn't hold, we'd reasonably expect more efficient energy use to lead to more energy consumption.

That's still the Jevons paradox.

> There isn't any reason to use less energy; if there are efficiency improvements then all else equal it makes the most sense to produce the same amount of energy and trade the excess into higher real living standards. Economies are good at sniffing that equilibrium out.

Massively wrong. Using more energy gives you sub-linear returns in value; you already got the lowest hanging fruit. For many uses you ramp up and use more power than before, but many uses you let your power bill drop.

To put it differently, read your own article. Right at the top it says "if demand is sufficiently price elastic".

Demand is often not sufficiently price elastic.

	▲	roenxi 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And then as you get through the article you get down to the section on the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate where start getting observations out of the academy that energy use goes up on efficiency increases even if Jevons' paradox doesn't trigger, and the section on energy conservation policy where the situation gets muddy but there isn't any reason to believe that improving energy efficiency would lead to lower energy use. There is no way that the dropping per capita energy efficiency in the UK is being driven by efficiency gains, there is no theoretical reason to expect the two to pair up in the first place and it is clearly an energy squeeze when you look at the situation in context of the political and other real economic indicators. If the UK could drop 33% of its electricity use while maintaining a healthy economy that'd be a miracle on par if not exceeding what China managed in the last 50 years. That is simply not the situation, nobody seems to be talking about the vast improvements to QoL being driven by their vast surplus that has theoretically developed in the efficiency scenario [0]. Any industry that needs electricity is considering leaving. As I learned in this comments section the UKians are literally rioting in the streets which is, sadly, not a surprise given their energy statistics and the head-in-sand strategy that seems to go hand in hand. [0] I also feel great temptation to allege that people in the UK have been forced into straits so dire that they subsist on a diet of lightbulbs, but my will is strong.