Environmental Economics on Treehugger Gifts
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 1.05
Tim Haab makes an interesting point in Environmental Economics comparing the prices of gifts on Treehugger to roughly comparable items at Toy's R Us. We point out that Treehugger has entire categories of Gifts under $25, Gifts under $15, and our new Holiday Gift Guide has lots to look at that is affordable. ::Treehugger Holiday Gift Guide
In any case, our octopus is much cuter.
Grist commented on that too. Here's what I wrote over there:
"Many factors.
Sometimes things are more expensive because they are produced in smaller quantities, sometimes it's because of labor cost, sometimes it's because costs are internalized while many big corps exernalize almost all their costs and we end up paying for them (social, environmental, etc) in other ways (think of Wal-Mart)...
I guess that we can hope for 2 things: that as eco-things get more popular, prices will drop, and that big corps will yield to pressure and start producing eco-stuff at relatively low prices too."
Not only are these things not mass produced, many of them are custom made. In cases where the design is novel, a fair comparison could be made to computers, calculators, DVD decks and so on. Early adopters buy them for several thousand dollars, it catches on the the price drops an order of magnitude. Once the Chinesemake sufficient knock offs (which should theoretically happen less with green goods) the price can even drop another order of magnitude. Less than ten years after their mass marketing, for example, one can get a DVD player now for around $60. Surely we know that not every design becomes comoditized; nor would we really want them to be. But its an apples and oranges comparison to use the DVD business model to green goods that will never grow beyond a niche market. Typical though of economists to ignore their own wisdom in nagging TreeHuggers