# Evaporation of improvements

I don't know if there is a standard way to express the idea that "if something seems like an obvious improvement of your situation, the advantage will probably (almost) disappear after everything settles in a *new balance*".

Examples:

*   people make more money (yay)... inflation happens and things get more expensive (oh no)
*   people make more money *and* things get cheaper (yay)... the rent increases (oh no)
*   a new tool makes you twice as productive (yay)... your boss doubles your production quota while keeping your wage the same (oh no)
*   a new tool makes you twice as productive *and* you are the boss (yay)... there are now more products on the market so their price drops to half (oh no)
*   a new tool makes your work much easier to do (yay)... you get replaced by a less smart and experienced guy who can now also do your work, and is cheaper than you (oh no)
*   agile software development allows you to deal with the chaotic nature of software development (yay)... managers give you incomplete task assignments and keep changing them randomly later, because hey now that you are agile you should be able to handle that without a problem (oh no)
*   automated software testing makes the work of testers more effective (yay)... companies stop hiring testers, because with such great tools the developers can do their own testing (oh no)
*   there are software libraries for almost everything, so you do not need to solve many difficult problems (yay)... to use those libraries you need to learn many abstract concepts, many libraries come with their own domain-specific language that sometimes changes from version to version, or you need to update them all the time because of bugs and vulnerabilities (oh no)

This is different from skepticism ("a new tool that makes you twice as productive? sounds like snake oil") in that we *accept* the premise ("the new tool makes you twice as productive"), we only reject the implied *naive conclusion* ("...and therefore your job will become easier and/or your wage higher and/or your workday shorter").

This is also different from mere pessimism ("you say, an improvement? it will probably only make things worse") in that the familiarity with this concept gives you an approximate direction showing which specific bad things could happen as a consequence. For example, if someone said "what if humanity invented drugs that would reduce your need to sleep to two hours a day, and would have zero negative side-effects", this concept points you towards "*something* will consume the extra time", so you only need to make a guess *what specifically* that would be (possible candidates: longer workday, longer commute, you would need two jobs, you would need to do some certification or other job-related activity in your supposedly free time, or maybe bureaucracy would expand, your kids would get much more homework...).

I think this is also slightly different from "when you solve your old problems, you will find new challenges". Yes, if you have many problems, you solve the most painful one first, and then the second painful one *comes to your focus*. But this is about the second problem appearing or growing as a *consequence of getting more slack* after solving the first problem. So the second problem in some sense wasn't actively attacking you until you solved the first one; kinda like a fisherman who won't catch a small fish because he is waiting for it to grow up.

Of course, more examples are welcome!