My household runs a significant deficit with our two principal trading partners: Amazon and the neighborhood supermarket.  On a smaller scale, we run a chronic trade deficit with Seattle City Light, a government agency that supplies electrical power.

Unlike my principal trading partners, City Light sends a letter every couple of months telling me how much of their product – electrical power — I am using compared to my “average” neighbors and my “efficient” neighbors.

City Light is not subtle.  They want me to reduce my consumption of electrical power.  Their letter underscores how much my use exceeds my neighbors’.  It points out how much money I could save by being as thrifty as even my average neighbors, let alone the efficient ones.

If you care to know, my average neighbors – average in their use of electricity, extraordinary in every other way in my opinion – spend $476 a year less than I do on electricity on their home power bill.  That comes to about $1.30 a day.  It’s worth $1.30 a day to me not to have to think about how to save it.

These so-called average neighbors – they’re special to me no matter what City Light says about them – might use more electricity than at first appears.  If you wash and dry your clothes at a laundromat or if you send them out to a cleaner, you’re using electricity, but it’s not on your household utility bill.  Same if you eat a lot of meals out, drink your beer in a bar, buy your ice at a convenience store, and so on.

Methodological problems aside, it’s a strange message from a seller.  Why does City Light want me to use less of what they sell?  When I wheel my cart to the checkout at QFC, they don’t tell me that I am spending more than my neighbors.  They never give me tips on how I might get by with less food.  Nor does Amazon encourage me to use smaller quantities of the countless items they have on offer.

I think the difference is that City Light is politically constrained in its ability to acquire new sources of power.  It must be difficult for them to expand their supply.  A proposal to acquire power from a facility that burns fossil fuels would cause audible retching in City Hall.  Hydropower or nuclear power?  A game farm where customers can shoot baby panda bears for sport would have a better chance of gaining approval.

There is also a political constraint on prices.  Amazon, QFC, and my other mutually voluntary trading partners offer goods and services at prices I can take or leave, but they are prices that they know they can live with if I take them.  If their prices are too low, they may run out of stock quickly without sufficient return to justify restocking.  If their prices are too high, inventory will sit on the shelf.  They have to get the pricing right.  They have stayed in business for a considerable time, so it appears that they have acquired this skill.

City Light’s pricing, like their supply, is subject to political discipline.  The price of electricity has to be “affordable” which means that it is almost certainly too low to dampen demand to the level that would allow City Light to avoid worrying about constraints on supply.  They can’t raise prices without bringing pitchforks into the street, so they have to use moral suasion to control consumption.  I don’t think it’s an effective tool.

I would give more respect to their plea that I use less power if they would level with me about these issues.  Cheap plentiful electrical power is one of the keys to the spectacular lifestyle that modern Americans enjoy.  The average American in our time enjoys more convenience at the push of a button than a member of the highest stratum of the Roman Empire or the British Empire could have imagined – to name two civilizations whose influence in the world of their time compares to ours.  I can’t help it that the purveyors of electrical power and those who regulate them value their product so far below its true worth.

But it’s beneath their dignity and that of their customers to use some weak brew of guilt and shame to try to alter the behavior of their customers.  Anyone who grew up hearing parents ask “Why can’t you be more like your [fill in the blank – brother, sister, cousin, neighbor, friend]?” will, by the time he or she is old enough to pay his or her own electric bill, be immune to a plea to be more like one’s “average” neighbors.