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«@hankgreen.bsky.social has one of the best explainers of it I've seen (including that it's not a paradox)...» I mean, aren't most popularly named paradoxes also not paradoxes? In fact, this too should be a named paradox.

"When you're in a Jevons moment, there are constraints and we don't know what the constraints will be." And that's a good line, but one of my ABSOLUTE favorite facts about Jevons and his paradox is that even HE had absolutely no clue what the constraints would be, leading to a fun coda to his life.

When Jevons died, he had a room FILLED WITH PAPER because he thought the world was going to run out of paper, so he hoarded all the paper he could find so he could keep writing, even after the expected great paper shortage.

I love everything about that paragraph which is from David Warsh's lovely book "Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations." Not only the home filled with paper, but Warsh's subtle parenthetical about oil sticking the dagger in Jevons' initial "paradox" regarding coal shows the impossibility of predictions