The Jevons effect has nothing to do with how efficient something gets. Lightbulbs could be free to build & operate and it'd still trigger Jevons. Electricity use won't drop unless it got more expensive to produce electricity. Or, ironically, unless electric goods suddenly become much less efficient for some reason.
It is built into the laws of supply and demand. If you want to argue that the Jevons effect won't apply you basically have to argue that the supply/demand curves are funky. In this case there is no reason to believe they are.
> The Jevons effect has nothing to do with how efficient something gets.
Why do you say that? From the first sentence of the link you posted: “In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); however, as the cost of using the resource drops, if the price is highly elastic, this results in overall demand increases causing total resource consumption to rise.”
It has everything to do with efficiency, as higher efficiency is what makes it a paradox. It’s not even interesting, let alone a paradox, if we ignore efficiency and talk about lower prices leading to increased demand.
Why would the demand curve for lighting not be “funky”?
If someone offered to pay for all of your home lighting, no matter how much power your lighting took, how much lighting would you get? Presumably a bounded amount! But in this case, the price you are paying for power for lighting is zero. So, reducing the energy use per amount of lighting would presumably not increase the amount of lighting you use beyond this limit, and therefore would decrease the energy you use for lighting.
The unrealistic assumptions - the argument started by assuming that resources are unlimited. Most of economics is expected to break down from that starting point. The point of all the models is theorising about how people will distribute limited resources.
It is like talking about the market for air or trying to measure its supply/demand curves. They are completely degenerate because it is too abundant for anything meaningful to be said.
The unrealistic assumption of someone offering to pay the part of your electricity bill that comes from lighting, no matter how big? Ok, yes, that’s clearly unrealistic,
but, the cost of this presumably wouldn’t be like, totally insane, right?
Of course, I don’t mean that in realistic scenarios that the amount of energy used for lighting would decrease directly by the proportion given by the increase in efficiency of light-per-power, which would only happen if you had exactly no demand for more lighting than you have even if it was free,
but that doesn’t mean the energy used would necessarily increase, just that it wouldn’t decrease as much as it would if you consumed the same amount of lighting.
I mean, the Jevons paradox is that increased efficiency can lead to increased use? No?
So, the idea would be that being able to more efficiently use electricity for running lights might still see us use more electricity for lights as we use them in more and more places. And, at a personal level, that kind of tracks. We don't hesitate to put lights in places that we used to accept as dark.
You certainly see this with televisions. The dramatic increase in efficiency afforded by new television technologies has seen us both start having screens everywhere, and in larger televisions.
It is built into the laws of supply and demand. If you want to argue that the Jevons effect won't apply you basically have to argue that the supply/demand curves are funky. In this case there is no reason to believe they are.