WastedEnergy

There’s a strain of thought in environomics that goes something like this:  There’s no point in conserving energy, resources, or anything else for that matter, since for every bit you save, there will always be someone else who is ready to scarf up your savings.  When you try to put something away for use at a later date, that just makes it easier for someone else to come along and consume it today.  In price terms, imagine it this way: if you shiver in the dark, thereby conserving gas and electricity, that makes everyone else’s gas and electricity bills lower, and it makes it less likely they will care about conserving gas and electricity.  Economists refer to this concept as the “Jevons Paradox,” named after some obscure economist (everything in economics is self-referential).  To the rest of us, it might be known as the Piggy Principle, since it describes those who are always greedy and eager to snatch up anything you leave over:

Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom…

There is some validity to the idea, and it is helpful in shattering some of the more unhelpful notions that some environmentalists have from time to time.  For instance, the example above, shivering in the dark, is not really all that helpful: it makes you uncomfortable, and it won’t save the world.  But the Piggy Principle doesn’t describe everything about how the world works.  Up to a certain point, the amount you can and do consume is very highly correlated with happiness and well-being.  If you are starving, it’s fairly likely that greater availability of food will improve your lot in life.  If you are already full, it probably won’t.  Economists have a fancy term for being full, like they have fancy terms for everything else: “the bliss point.”

The biggest problem with the Piggy Principle is it presumes that everyone wants to consume as much as possible, always, no matter what.  In the mind of an economic “thinker,” who cannot conceive of the idea that additional consumption does not always benefit a person, this idea makes sense.  Why would anyone ever not want “moar?”  For example, John Tierney might say something like “Salt tastes good.  Most people like salty food.  Science can’t prove there’s anything wrong with eating as much salt as you want, all the time.”  But guess what?  When I eat a really salty meal, I feel like crap afterwards.  So that means if you conserve salt, and the lower price of salt triggers me to eat more of it, I wouldn’t actually benefit.

What if you could conceive of a way that you could lower everyone’s gas and electricity bills at the same time, without making them any more uncomfortable, and with only a minimal amount of effort?  That might subvert the Piggy Principle indeed…