William Stanley Jevons

Jevons paradox: Increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used increases the usage of that resource. William Stanley Jevons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox 

    

    In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons' effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.[3] 

  This in turn increased total coal consumption, even as the amount of coal required for any particular application fell. Jevons argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use, writing: "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth."[4]

  ([ as we learned to make better use of paper, we will over a longer-term use more paper, and finding more use for paper; one example, using a square piece of paper - in origami - to fold into a crane (a bird) ])

  ([ as we learned to develope circular use of resources, and as we learned to use those resources that was once considered to be waste and throw away, we should end up using more of it? ])

  Jevons argued that this view was incorrect, as further increases in efficiency would tend to increase the use of coal. Hence, improving technology would tend to increase the rate at which England's coal deposits were being depleted, and could not be relied upon to solve the problem.[4][5]

  Although Jevons originally focused on the issue of coal, the concept has since been extended to the use of any resource, including, for example, water usage[8] and interpersonal contact.[9] The expansion of slavery in the United States following the invention of the cotton gin has also been cited as an example of the paradox.[10] It is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2]

  At the microeconomic level (looking at an individual market), even with the rebound effect, improvements in energy efficiency usually result in reduced energy consumption.[16]

  However, at the macroeconomic level, more efficient (and hence comparatively cheaper) energy leads to faster economic growth, which increases energy use throughout the economy. Saunders argued that taking into account both microeconomic and macroeconomic effects, the technological progress that improves energy efficiency will tend to increase overall energy use.[13]

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Humphrey’s Law — The User Does Not Know What They Want Until Production

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Conway’s Law — The Structure of the Organization That Designs is Constrained To Produce Copies of That Organization ['s pathway communication] Structure

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Brooks’ Law — Adding Manpower To A Project Delays The Project Even Further

    Brooks's law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Named after Fred Brooks, author of the well known book on project management The Mythical Man-Month.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

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 • Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy - itself - always get in control, and, those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents revisited, 2018, 2002 

p.267

A U.S. government enterprise called the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) would buy Russian uranium from deactivated nuclear warheads and bring it to the United States. 

p.268

Worse still, we at the Council of Economic Advisers had analyzed that it had every incentive to keep the Russian uranium out of the United States.

p.268

USEC adamantly denied that it would ever act counter to broader U.S. interests, and affirmed that it would always bring in Russian uranium as fast as the Russians were willing to sell; but the very week that it made these protestations, I got told of a secret agreement between USEC and the Russian agency.  The Russian had offered to triple their their deliveries, and USEC had not only turned them down but paid a handsome amount in what could only be termed “hush money” to keep the offer (and USEC's refusal) secret. 

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents revisited, 2018, 2002 

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Weber's law - Numberphile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHG8io5qIU8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHG8io5qIU8

9:02

numberphile

May 25, 2018

sources:

https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/06/16/233201/when-graphs-are-a-matter-of-life-and-death

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/21/when-graphs-are-a-matter-of-life-and-death

The author of the New Yorker article is Hannah Fry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry

Hannah Fry is the presenter to this BBC, of sorts, show about some thing - I no longer remember - okay, what I remember is that she talks about math in ways that I can understand and, I know she knows about math from ... I don't remember... 

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Allen curve

correlation between distance and communication is called the Allen curve because Allen found that frequency of communication between engineers drops off exponentially as the distance between them increases. After about 50 meters, there's very little communication among groups of engineers.

to ensure that everyone is within 50 meters. 

source: ???

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Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik, Breakthrough, 2004                          [ ] 

p.77

Fitt's Law predicts how quickly a person can move a hand from a starting place to a visible target. The time increases with distance to the target. It also increases when the target is small and hard to hit.

   (Stefik, Mark., Breakthrough : stories and strategies of radical innovation / Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik., 1. technological innovation., 2. inventions., 2004, )

([ the principle that distance matters ])

([ in other words, the time needed to travel, to communicate, to move between any two different area (territory) (zone) does matter ])

([ examples, to move a mouse pointer and click on a target, to fire a missile to hit a target])

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Summary

The Peter Principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again.[1] If the person is competent in the new role, they will be promoted again and will continue to be promoted until reaching a level at which they are incompetent. Being incompetent, the individual will not qualify for promotion again, and so will remain stuck at this "Final Placement" or "Peter's Plateau."

This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and enough positions in the hierarchy to which competent employees may be promoted. The "Peter Principle" is therefore expressed as: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. "This leads to Peter's Corollary: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties." Hull calls the study of how hierarchies work "hierarchiology."[2]:22, 24, 148

source:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".[1] It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization.

source: 

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

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Nov 19th 1955

Editor’s note (July 2020): In this essay from 1955 C. Northcote Parkinson described and defined the natural tendency for officials to make more work for each other. The charts have been updated to fit the website

      IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil. (C. Northcote Parkinson, 1955)

source: 

        https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law

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Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat is a book, credited to the pseudonym Archibald Putt, published in 1981. An updated edition, subtitled How to Win in the Information Age, was published by Wiley-IEEE Press in 2006. The book is based upon a series of articles published in Research/Development Magazine in 1976 and 1977.

The book proposes Putt's Law and Putt's Corollary

Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."[3]

Putt's Corollary: "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion." with incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management.[3]

source: 

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successful_Technocrat

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Efficiency Dilemma, Jevons effect

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/the-efficiency-dilemma

 December 20, 2010 Issue

The Efficiency Dilemma

If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?

By David Owen

James McWilliams, who is the author of the recent book “Just Food,” told me, “Refrigeration and packaging convey to the consumer a sense that what we buy will last longer than it does. Thus, we buy enough stuff to fill our capacious Sub-Zeros and, before we know it, a third of it is past its due date and we toss it.” (The item that New Yorkers most often throw away unused, according to the anthropologist-in-residence at the city’s Department of Sanitation, is vegetables.)

 Jonathan Bloom, who runs the Web site wastedfood.com and is the author of the new book “American Wasteland,” told me that, since the mid-nineteen-seventies, per-capita food waste in the United States has increased by half, so that we now throw away forty per cent of all the edible food we produce. And when we throw away food we don’t just throw away nutrients; we also throw away the energy we used in keeping it cold as we lost interest in it, as well as the energy that went into growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting it, along with its proportional share of our staggering national consumption of fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation water, packaging, and landfill capacity. According to a 2009 study, more than a quarter of U.S. freshwater use goes into producing food that is later discarded.

Efficiency improvements push down costs at every level—from the mining of raw materials to the fabrication and transportation of finished goods to the frequency and intensity of actual use—and reduced costs stimulate increased consumption. (Coincidentally or not, the growth of American refrigerator volume has been roughly paralleled by the growth of American body-mass index.) 

Stan Cox, who is the author of the recent book “Losing Our Cool,” told me that, between 1993 and 2005, “the energy efficiency of residential air-conditioning equipment improved twenty-eight per cent, but energy consumption for A.C. by the average air-conditioned household rose thirty-seven per cent.” One consequence, Cox observes, is that, in the United States, we now use roughly as much electricity to cool buildings as we did for all purposes in 1955. 

And access to cooled air is self-reinforcing: to someone who works in an air-conditioned office, an un-air-conditioned house quickly becomes intolerable, and vice versa. A resident of Las Vegas once described cars to me as “devices for transporting air-conditioning between buildings.” 

According to Cox, between 1997 and 2007 the use of air-conditioners tripled in China (where a third of the world’s units are now manufactured, and where many air-conditioner purchases have been subsidized by the government).

(Cox writes that, by 2014, the U.S. computer network alone will each year require an amount of energy equivalent to the total electricity consumption of Australia.) 

In India, air-conditioning is projected to increase almost tenfold between 2005 and 2020; according to a 2009 study, it accounted for forty per cent of the electricity consumed in metropolitan Mumbai.

Energy production may account for only a small percentage of our economy, but its falling share of G.D.P. has made it more important, not less, since every kilowatt we generate supports an ever larger proportion of our well-being. The logic misstep is apparent if you imagine eliminating primary energy from the world. If you do that, you don’t end up losing “between six and eight per cent” of current economic activity, as Schipper’s formulation might suggest; you lose almost everything we think of as modern life. 

..., population growth itself can be a Jevons effect: the more efficient we become, the more people we can sustain; the more people we sustain, the more energy we consume.

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Iron law of oligarchy

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties.[1] It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.[1]

Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.

Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically to build his argument in 1911, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, and stated: "Who says organization, says oligarchy."[1] He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."[1]

According to Michels, all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members.[2]

Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.[1]  Later Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next legitimate step of modern societies. The thesis became popular once more in post-war America with the publication of Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1956) and during the red scare brought about by McCarthyism.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy is similar to the concept in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a fictional book in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell. The book begins:[16]

      Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.[17]

source:  

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

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Plato's five regimes

The philosopher Plato discusses five types of regimes (Republic, Book VIII; Greek: πέντε πολιτεῖαι). They are Aristocracy, 

                            Timocracy, 

                            Oligarchy, 

                            Democracy, and 

                              Tyranny. Plato also assigns a man to each of these regimes to illustrate what they stand for. The tyrannical man would represent Tyranny, for example. These five regimes progressively degenerate starting with Aristocracy at the top and Tyranny at the bottom.

source:  

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes

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