Last week’s pair of books, Schumacher and Carter and Dale, made two arguments: scale technology to how people actually live, and make deferred costs legible before they become catastrophes. Two more books, one from 1978 and one from 1986, extend the case in a direction the charging industry has almost entirely missed. The problem is not only what we build or what we price. It is what we count.
Hazel Henderson’s Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics (1978) carries a foreword by Schumacher and is often credited with helping launch the “Small Is Beautiful” movement, so it is not a detour from last week so much as the same thread pulled further. Henderson’s central target is Gross National Product. Her argument, blunt and still uncomfortable, is that GNP counts the wrong things as progress. Her favourite illustration: the money spent cleaning up after a disaster adds to growth figures. Destruction registers as prosperity because the ledger cannot tell the difference. Once you accept that the headline metric is measuring the wrong quantity, a great deal of received economic wisdom stops deserving your deference.
Apply that lens to a charging network. Measured only by revenue collected at the plug, distributed Level 2 charging looks marginal. The units are modest. The per-session take is small. By the standard against which a petrol forecourt or a DC fast-charging hub is judged, the numbers look thin. But that standard is measuring the wrong quantity. The actual product of the network is not the electricity sold at retail. It is the carbon intensity displaced when a kilometre driven on grid power replaces a kilometre driven on combustion fuel. Conventional energy accounting cannot see that value, in exactly the way GNP cannot see the difference between building a house and rebuilding one after a flood. The compliance-credit mechanism under Canada’s Clean Fuel Regulations and British Columbia’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard is, in Henderson’s terms, a corrected measurement. It counts something real that the old ledger left blank.
David Ross and Peter Usher’s From the Roots Up: Economic Development as if Community Mattered (1986) supplies the second half. Their argument is that the habit of separating economic problems from social ones, the reflex of bottom-line thinking, has to give way to what they call social accounting: recognizing that value created in smaller structures closer to the community is genuine economic value, even when market metrics discount it to zero. Co-operatives, small enterprises, household and voluntary activity, the informal economy: none of it shows up cleanly in the national accounts, and all of it is real.
This is the economic-development frame for an argument last week made only in engineering terms. The distributed model is not merely a better technical fit than the centralized hub. It is a roots-up structure in Ross and Usher’s precise sense. A charger installed at no cost to the host, in a workplace car park or a multi-unit residential building, turns that site into a place where shared value is created rather than a meter from which revenue is extracted. The host is a participant, not a customer. The driver is a participant, not merely a wallet. Value accrues to the community that hosts the infrastructure, and the network is built with those communities rather than imposed on them from a highway exit. Ross and Usher would recognize the shape immediately: appropriate, democratic, close to the ground.
Put the two books together and the through-line is measurement. Henderson says the headline metric counts the wrong quantity and therefore misjudges what is valuable. Ross and Usher say the value created in small, community-embedded structures is invisible to that same metric and is real all the same. Both are describing the same blind spot from different angles, and distributed EV charging sits squarely inside it. Judged by retail margin at the plug, the roots-up network looks like a marginal business that survives on a subsidy. Judged by what it actually produces, displaced carbon intensity, value created with the communities that host it, it is the economically rational structure. The subsidy framing is an artifact of the wrong metric. Change the accounting, which is exactly what CFR and LCFS do, and the picture inverts.
The centralized hub is legible to conventional economics because it behaves like the thing conventional economics already knows how to measure: a high-capital asset recovering its cost through per-unit sales. That legibility is not a sign it is the better model. It is a sign it fits the old ledger. The distributed model looks strange to that ledger for the same reason the informal economy and the disaster-cleanup paradox looked strange to Henderson and to Ross and Usher: it is doing something the metric was never built to parse.
Four authors, none of them writing about electricity, working decades before the first mass-market EV. The measurement problem they diagnosed is the one the charging industry is still failing to solve.
