Evaporation of improvements

I wouldn't call it evaporation of improvements. They are not disappearing. It's more like they are diffused. After all, it is about genuine improvements. These save time or cost or energy. It is just that when you look at it locally, what seems like an improvement for you alone is indeed something that doesn't happen in isolation. If many people save cost/time, the overall system will, as you write, settle into a new balance where the improvements are shared by many. Often unequally, which is just reflecting unequal power that existed before. 

I think one way of looking at this is that all of your examples are negotiations. (Between buyer and seller, tenant and landlord, employer and worker). So of course, anything that makes the deal much sweeter for one of those two parties ends up split between them. Roughly if the negotiating strength of the two parties is such that your boss get 50% of the value, and you get 50%, then if something adds extra value to the equation (a more productive tool), you only see half of it. If your negotiating position was only getting you 10% then you will see very little indeed, even from large improvements.

I suppose the silver lining is that if something adds value for the other party you will benefit. You might not even know what it is.

Reminds me Parkinson's Law, which states work expands to fill the time given to complete it. So if at your job you manage to improve your efficiency and decrease your workload by 50%, your employer's "reward" for you is to fill that time with more work.

Entrepreneur Naval Ravikant has said previously that one of his favorite employees was this one guy who was more productive than all other employees while only doing 2 hours of work per day. The rest of his 8-hour work day (6 hours) was spent watching cricket matches. 

Naval had to constantly tell managers to leave that hyper-productive employee alone because they wanted to fill his day with more work to do. Those managers failed to realize that if the productive employee was forced to work (or pretend to look busy) for a full 8 hours, that he might get burned out and quit.

The most frequent expression I see used for this is alpha, by which people mean the temporary advantage that comes from new things in finance. It has since moved into entrepreneurship lingo. However, I note that alpha speaks to a competitive environment, where you lose the advantage because other people are doing it; it isn't normally used to cover the situations you describe where a company shoots themselves in the foot, for example.

Three related effects/terms:

1. Malthusian Trap as the maybe most famous example.

2. In energy/environment we tend to refer to such effects as

• "rebound" when behavioral adjustment compensates part of the originally enable saving (energy consumption doesn't go down so much as better window insulation means people afford to keep the house warmer) and
• "backfiring" when behavioral adjustment means we overcompensate (let's assume flights become very efficient, and everyone who today wouldn't have been flying because of cost or environmental conscience, starts to fly all the time, so even more energy is consumed in the end)

3. In economics (though more generally than only the compensation effects you mention): "equilibrium" effects; indeed famously often offsetting effects in the place where an original perturbation occurred, although as mentioned by Gunnar_Zarncke, maybe overall there is often simply a diffusion of the benefits to overall society. Say, with competitive markets in labor & goods, and making one product becomes more efficient: Yes, you as a worker in that sector won't benefit specifically from the improvement in the long run, but as society overall we slightly expanded our Pareto frontier of how much stuff we like we can produce.

This would seem related to the notion that "Nature abhors a vacuum", and to the thesis of 'Meditations on Moloch', and to Ilya Prigogine's concept of "Dissipative Structures"... Perhaps one could simply say that it is a natural result of the interplay between entropy and various systems which 'fight' against it. 

The dimensionality of possible improvements is both hopeful and also daunting. Lots of improvements being possible feels pretty cool in high agency states. Things needing lots of dimensions of improvement before they aren't terrible feels hopeless from low agency states.

Another example is risk compensation: You make an activity safer (yay) and participants compensate by taking more risks (oh no).

"A slow sort of country!" said the [Red] Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" -- Alice through the Looking-Glass