Weeknotes 2nd to 7th November

07 Nov 2025

Jevons’ Paradox and Baumol’s Costs Disease

It’s an unusual week when two things I studied in A-Level economics are spotted in the wild. Even more unusual is when they have relevance to the things we’re trying to do in local government digital.

Jevons’ paradox is from The Coal Question published in 1866. Jevons set out a theory that as something gets more efficient, you lower the cost and open up more potential use cases. This drives up demand that exceeds the gains in efficiency.

The tech sector is using this thinking to model future AI revenues - that more efficient models will increase overall demand and generate the revenue to pay for all this capital investment. At a much simpler level, I’ve seen this play out in digital teams. As we introduce reusable platforms, the business case for some of our smaller services becomes easier to make which drives up overall demand. Every time I think our increased efficiency will buy us some breathing room, I am reminded of Jevons book about coal.

The core idea in Baumol’s cost disease is that wages across the economy will rise together and the public and private sector are competing for the same people. In very people driven services (a lot of where the public sector spends its money) you hit some hard limits in the unit cost vs. output equation. A care worker, with all the AI tools in the world, can still only care for so many people in a day.

This is all a very long way of me saying we have to look beyond just cost reduction and efficiency, we need to use design and digital to fundamentally change the whole system. We shouldn’t try to do this alone, structural problems require structural solutions.

What I’ve been doing

We have some procurement decisions working their way through the process. Being a shared service means double governance and double briefings, but it’s a pretty well oiled machine with colleagues doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Resilience has been a theme of the week. Not personal resilience, but the emergency planning kind of resilience. A half day training session with fellow directors for Sutton Council’s Silver command rota (the folks who will lead the tactical planning and coordination in an emergency), followed by a refresher course ahead of my week on call for Kingston’s Gold command rota (the strategic leadership).

A few boards for things like capital investment, corporate performance management, transformation and risk management. Some quality time with the team too, collaborating with our transformation friends. The end of a week brought a bit of a challenging issue, but by the time I was back off the school run all that was needed from me was to review some comms explaining to affected users what happened and how it was going to be very quickly sorted out.

Managed to squeeze in a bit of time catching up with some trusted folks in my network too.

Reading

A very rare re-read. But knowing next week I am on call, I went back to the wisdom in Lucy Easthope’s book on emergency planning and recovery - When the Dust Settles