In 1865, an English economist named William Stanley Jevons made an observation that has been proven right every single time since — and ignored every single time since.
His insight was simple: when a tool becomes more efficient, consumption of the resource it uses doesn't decrease. It explodes. It's worth looking up. The implications reach much further than the coal mines where he first observed it.
The pattern repeats. Every time.
Photography was once a specialized trade. Trained professionals with expensive equipment, darkrooms, and years of craft. The tools improved. The camera became a phone. The phone became a button. Today, every marketing team, every small business owner, every event organizer is their own photographer — taking approximately 1.4 trillion photos per year.
Efficiency didn't reduce the demand for photography. It handed it to everyone.
Desktop publishing removed the specialist. The volume of content produced globally didn't shrink — it became incomprehensible in scale. Financial modelling was confined to analysts. Spreadsheet tools put it in every manager's hands. The amount of analysis performed across organizations didn't decrease. It multiplied across every level of every business.
The pattern is consistent: make something more efficient, and you don't get less of it. You get dramatically, almost unimaginably, more.
Now think about messaging.
There was a time when sending a formal business message was a specialized job. Correspondence clerks. Stenographers. Roles that existed specifically because crafting and managing written business communication required dedicated skill, time, and training. It was a profession.
Then the tools got more efficient. Typewriters. Word processors. Email. Instant messaging. The specialist role didn't just evolve — it dissolved into the general workforce. Today, most employees spend a significant portion of their working day doing what was once a dedicated profession. Writing, responding, communicating in writing — at volume, at speed, across every level of every organization.
The job title disappeared. The work didn't.
It democratized. It scaled. And the total volume of business communication produced every day now dwarfs anything the original specialists could have handled in a lifetime.
Jevons would not have been surprised.
When institutional money speaks, it's worth listening.
Apollo Global Management recently stated publicly that AI will create a greater need for lawyers, not fewer — grounding their reasoning explicitly in Jevons' Paradox. As AI makes legal work more efficient, the volume of legal activity it unlocks will increase faster than the efficiency gains reduce it. These are people whose job is to move billions of dollars in the right direction. When they invoke a 160-year-old economic paradox to explain where an entire profession is heading, that's a signal worth sitting with.
Work doesn't disappear when it becomes efficient. It changes shape.
The consistent outcome across every wave of efficiency isn't fewer workers. It's a shift in who does the work, at what scale, and at what volume. Specialists become generalists. Generalized work scales across entire workforces. Total output — and total demand — increases in ways that consistently exceed what anyone predicted at the start of the efficiency curve.
Now Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are making entire categories of knowledge work dramatically more efficient.
When the tool gets vastly better, demand for the resource doesn't decrease. As Jevons' Paradox predicts — it explodes. AI is the new tool. The resource? Human work.
If this sparked something, look up Jevons' Paradox.
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