| This question <63|56> overall <63|65> Hans: <59|65>. |
| Question 90: Is it a character flaw to be lazy in an exploitive system? |
| [64] Hans: The Treacherous Fairness of Markets. According to what Marx has said so far, it is easy to think that an economy in which prices are determined by labor content is a fair economy. It is fair that those who are lazy lose their jobs, and the measurement of labor by time, topic of question 89, is also the fairest practicable way to measure labor. This reinforces the common consciousness that markets are a good thing. |
| But assume now that a person has lower output than the average worker not because she is lazy, but because she is handicapped in some way. Shouldn't a handicapped person get full credit for her labor time even if the output is lower? |
| I'd like to give you a second example where it is fair to value the same commodity at different prices. This comes from my Thursday evening class on renewable energy policies. In order to promote renewable energies, Germany has passed laws according to with electricity generated by wind turbines or by photovoltaic (PV) panels can be sold to the utility companies at a higher price than electricity generated by coal-fired power plants. This price is deliberately set at such levels that homeowners installing PV panels on their roofs can make a modest return on their investment, and likewise with farmers who erect a wind turbine on their fields. Each technology has its price, and the price is guaranteed long enough so that investment pays off. |
| This has been an incredibly successful policy, which not only placed German way ahead of the EU-wide goals for renewable energy, but which also made Germany a major international supplier of wind turbines and PV cells. A report documenting this success is at |
| http://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/erfahrungsbericht_eeg_en.pdf |
| Why is this so successful? Because it promotes all technologies at the same time and therefore allows them all to go on a learning curve and become more efficient. Here in the US one often hears the critique that this policy picks winners and losers, i.e., that policy makers are trying to do something that it better left to the markets. The kind of policies one finds in the US try to be more cost-conscious, therefore they go for the cheapest renewable energy. But this means that these policies only promote wind power, while other technologies, such as geothermal or solar, are neglected for now. In the long run this is a more costly and less effective policy. One can even turn the table and argue that the policies emphasizing the cheapest renewable energy are in fact the ones that pick winners, while the German “Feed-In tariffs” try to promote all technologies equally. Equality makes sense because renewable energy must always be a diversified portfolio, one needs solar energy for the days when the wind doesn't blow, and wind for the nights when the sun doesn't shine. |
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