An economic principle stating that as technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases.

Dropped into AI strategy keynotes and podcasts by executives looking to sound like brilliant economists. It explains why making model inference faster and cheaper leads to companies spending 10x more money on model usage overall.

• Economic Keynote Flex: Dropping an 18th-century economic theory name into tech meetings to sound like an elite strategist.
• Usage Justification: Using economic paradoxes to explain why cloud computing bills doubled despite software efficiency gains.
• House-Cleaning Reality: Like getting a faster vacuum cleaner, vacuuming the house five times a day, and calling it "Jevons Paradox floor management."

The Lorax (2010s) scene where The Once-ler invents a super-efficient tree-chopping machine, leading to rapid, massive deforestation as production accelerates exponentially.

The economic rule where making a tool cheaper and faster leads to people using vastly more of it overall.

“Jevons Paradox demonstrates that lowering model API costs expands total enterprise software spend.”

“When we lowered the cost of our search tool API, employees started using it so much more that our total monthly bill actually increased.”