It leads to an interesting way to think about company and civic health as well. Instead of focussing purely on incentives, one might assume that many are inclined to do good stuff anyway, and then ask: are we lowering the cost of all desired behavior as much as possible? And are we doing it for as many people as possible?
I remember this theater on things which were suspected to be too expensive with insiffiufficient ROI to implement, except that all the time wasted by multiple people arguing in Jira tickets, sitting in meetings, and writing specifications was likely far more expensive than just building and testing the thing.
For some reason, there seems to be a strong and automatic tendency for older and larger organizations to drift toward petrification through bureaucratization.
I would argue that is not Jevons paradox but standard supply and demand (and this "reverse Jevons paradox" too). Jevons paradox occurs when a more efficient use of a resource leads to an increase in its use (instead of a decrease as a first order analysis would suggest).
xg15•42m ago
Or the changes might be "smuggled through" in an unrelated changeset that has to go through the red tape anyway.