Jevons paradox
The Jevons paradox is the economic observation that making the use of a resource more efficient can increase, rather than reduce, its total consumption.
The Jevons paradox describes how technological improvements that make a resource cheaper to use can raise demand so much that total consumption of the resource increases rather than falls. It is named after the English economist William Stanley Jevons, who noted in his 1865 book The Coal Question that more efficient steam engines had been accompanied by rising coal consumption.
The idea is frequently discussed in energy policy and environmental economics, and in technology it is used to explain why sharp drops in the cost of computing or services can expand overall usage.
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