– Part 1-
Of Three Laws: Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility (LDMU), Jevons’ Paradox, and Moore’s Law
I first encountered the law of diminishing marginal utility (LDMU) as an undergraduate student of economics in university, wrestling with the neat diagrams of descending marginal‑utility curves and the intuitive truth that each extra unit of a good yields less satisfaction than the one before.
It struck me as a quiet, almost moral observation about human appetite: no matter how much we have, the hunger for the next slice of bread, or the next upgrade of a device, eventually softens.
Much later, in the corporate finance world in which I worked (and survived) for well over 35 years, Moore’s Law I came to realise was a kind of mantra: the notional doubling of transistor density—and thus computing power—every couple of years, making the once‑unimaginable not only possible but ordinary. It felt like the engine of modernity itself: cheaper, faster, smaller, more pervasive.
Only in retirement, and now as a social observer and critic with deep interest cultivated in Vedanta Philosophy, rather than as a one-time student or a manager, did I stumble upon Jevons’ Paradox: the counterintuitive insight that when a resource becomes more efficient to use, our total consumption of it often rises, not falls. What Jevons saw in coal and steam engines, I was able to to see in microchips, data centres, and AI‑driven services: each leap in efficiency was not a brake on usage but an accelerator.
Three distinct yet oddly entangled ideas thus today has entered my mental horizon:
• LDM Utility: the internal, psychological truth that more does not always mean better.
• Moore’s Law: the empirical regularity that the price‑performance of technology improves relentlessly.
• Jevons’ Paradox: the market‑level effect that efficiency gains can trigger waves of expanded demand, overriding naive expectations of restraint.
(To be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi