Jevons paradox proposes that, under certain circumstances, increasing the efficiency with which a machine consumes a resource will cause net consumption of that resource to (counterintuitively) increase.

People dispute the applicability of this to refrigerator production, which increased efficiency, cubic volume of the units, and number of units sold all at the same time.


Some propose that new fuel efficency standards will cause people to drive more and use more fuel.


 A possible application of this law is to the Pogoplug, where the elephant in the room for resource consumption is electrical power, and the end product of data access is consumed.  The device offes the ability to more appropriately size our computers for a specific task, thereby offering greater efficiency.  It is advertised to use somewhere on the order of 5 Watts, which is very low, considering it will displace some use of say, a 80 W computer.

 I mean to leave it an open question as to whether the Pogoplug leads to more 'green' computing.  The burden of proof lies in answering these questions:

   1. Does a purchaser of the Pogoplug add more or less electricity consumption by plugging in the Pogoplug (and respective hard drives)  than they alleviate from the larger computers currently used to serve data?
   2. Does the increased 'data wealth' lead to greater consumption that would offset the difference in #1? Will we use more computers because they are more fun now?
   3. Does increased 'net wealth' due to lower power bills (or extended life of computers) cause us to buy more of other products that consume resources (at Walmart for instance)?  This assumes, of course, that the unit saves money by lowering the power bill more than its $80 or $100 price in the long run.

If the difference between my computer's standby state and on-state is 80 W (will be more for desktops, this is a more 'limiting' case), then the Pogoplug would need to allow me to put my computer in standby for more than:

24 * (5 / 80) = 1.5 hours per day

  In order for it to help the environment.  So with this, I put it forth that it is a quantitive question versus qualitive question, and evaluation is left up to one's own judgement in absense of hard data.

I thought it would be a fun thing to put in the off topic forum