Today, information technology is changing the world making it more idea intensive, better connected, and ultimately more urban. Improvements in information technology seem to have increased, rather than reduced, the value of face-to-face connections, which might be called Jevons’s Complementarity Corollary. The nineteenth-century English economist William Stanley Jevons noted that more fuel-efficient steam engines didn’t lead to less coal consumption. Better engines made energy use effectively less expansive, and helped move the world to an industrial era powered by coal. The term Jevons’s paradox had come to refer to any situation in which efficiency improvements lead to more, not less consumption — one reason why low-calorie cookies can lead to larger waistlines and fuel-efficient cars can end up consuming more gas. Jevons’s paradox applied to information technology means that as we acquire more efficient means of transmitting information, like e-mail or Skype, we spend more, not less, time transmitting information.
Excerpt from: Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser
