Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat
by goldenkey on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @09:48PM
(#16480279)
I totally agree with the sentiment here. If the utility is public, it exists to serve the people electricity, all of the people, whatever their needs may be. So it seems like the fair thing to do is for the utility to charge the rate it needs in order to maintain and upgrade its equipment. Then just divide that into the total usage and make the people pay the total adjusted for their individual use compared to the average.
That is: traditionally in China, you paid the doctor when you were well. When you were sick, treatment was offered without payment. The alignment of incentives is for patients to be healthy (or, for the cynical amongst you: for the doctor to be able to credibly claim this).
If various services were offered not on the basis of inputs consumed (as with electricity), but on the basis of outputs enabled, this dynamic would change.
For employees, this is the difference between measuring based on hours worked (or worse: present), and on deliverables achieved.
There's some complications to this: piecework payment is something that's long been criticised (Adam Smith argues against this in Wealth of Nations, 1776), largely in that it tends to overwork, even in the absence of overt coercion. Prices ultimately are meant to cover costs of provisioning, and there's the need to see that those costs are met. Measuring what is directly transacted is easier than measuring either complex inputs or often-at-a-remove outcomes (Smith also discusses the former, the latter is the topic of many decades of Monitoring and Evaluation theory and practice).