Consider, for instance, the profits of renewables generators. Nothing could be more un-‘natural’, as Polanyi would have seen it. Certainly, the profits are ‘real’ in the sense that they represent revenues less costs. But more than anything else perhaps, they are the product of continual, ongoing and, ultimately, rather haphazard efforts by policymakers to keep that magical financial output – revenues less costs – within what is best conceived as a zone of reasonableness. If profits are too low, developers will not invest; too high, and critics will cry foul. Thus policymakers are forever in
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