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cousin_it comments on Open Thread, August 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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The idea of risk compensation says that if you have a seatbelt in your car, you take more risks while driving. There seem to be many similar "compensation" phenomena that are not related to risk:
Building more roads might not ease congestion because people switch from public transport to cars.
Sending aid might not alleviate poverty because people start having more kids.
Throwing money at a space program might not give you Star Trek because people create make-work.
Having more free time might not make you more productive because you'll just waste it all on the internet.
The common theme is that increasing available resources invites hungry entities to come out of the woodwork and eat the surplus, so you don't get the benefit you bargained for. Is there an accepted name for this phenomenon? Is it studied?
This seems to fall under "rent dissipation". Here's a representative paper. ETA: Another one.
"Rent dissipation is deļ¬ned as the total expenditure of resources by all agents attempting to capture a rent or prize." It's an interesting concept, but seems to be slightly different from what I meant. In the situations above, wolves eat your surplus without spending much resources.
In that case it's a related topic called "rent seeking", I think. The second paper I linked above talks about how simple models of rent seeking predict total rent dissipation, but the paper wants to challenge that.
The Jevons paradox and rebound effect articles are more like what I had in mind, but still a little different.