The Jevons paradox and the limits of data storage

It is named after the economist William Stanley Jevons, who lived from 1835-1882. Here is an excerpt from his bio at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

"William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) was an economist and philosopher who foreshadowed several developments of the 20th century. He is one of the main contributors to the ‘marginal revolution’, which revolutionised economic theory and shifted classical to neoclassical economics. He was the first economist to construct index numbers, and he had a tremendous influence on the development of empirical methods and the use of statistics and econometrics in the social sciences. His philosophy can be seen as a precursor of logical empiricism, but because of the peculiar form of his logic, he would not have many direct followers. His textbooks on logic were widely used in class and reprinted many times."

The paradox came up in a recent Wall Street Journal article. See Data Storage Is Reaching the Limits of Physics: To improve hard drives, engineers are looking to new technologies and factories in orbit by Brian Michael Murphy. He is dean of Bennington College and has a new book, “We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World.” Excerpts: 

"the average lifespan of a digital hard drive is three to five years. Drives fail for a number of reasons: mechanical failure, format obsolescence, dust, heat, even a form of decay at the microscopic level that computer scientists call “bitrot,” where the bits lose or flip their magnetic charge."

"Hardware companies are investing in new technologies to keep hard drives on a path of increasing density and energy efficiency. Western Digital Corp. came up with one way to make the hard drive run superclean: filling it with helium, which has one-seventh the density of air and thus is less turbulent, producing less heat. Still, like earlier technologies, helium drives will eventually run into what’s known in economics as the “Jevons paradox.” When technological innovation produces increased energy efficiency, we end up using more energy anyway, since the rate of consumption will simply increase as demand rises. The idea of saving energy or money or resources is, in the end, an illusion."