Drinking in Private
Katherine Mangu-Ward | October 24, 2006, 5:48pm
"It is a little known fact that the United States today uses far less water per person, and less water in total, than we did twenty-five years ago."
After Tyler Cowen piqued my interest with the above quote, I dug into my New Yorker backlog to read an article about the world's water supply from last week's issue ("The Last Drop," October 23). The quote is from water expert Peter Gleick.
You can't get the article online, but you can read an interview with its author, Michael Specter. Asked about the morality of private control of water distribution, Specter had this to say:
I am not one of those who believe that there is any moral issue here. Privatization is neither good nor bad; it's a question of who profits and what people pay. If a private company could take over the water system of Delhi (or any other city), fix the pipes, and deliver water at an affordable price, why is that worse than letting a government control the water when it has proved incapable of doing the job properly?
The New Yorker has been on this beat for awhile, with a relatively fretful piece from 2002 here. Ron Bailey takes up the theme here.
db | October 25, 2006, 9:47am | #
Earlier in my career I worked for a water and wastewater treatment equipment company. I posted here at reason, a few years ago, a short blurb on water privatization and the potential of market pricing to encourage conservation of water, which I repost here ( I copied the text from an article on Slashdot, so moy original H&R post might be very slightly different):
The answer is not to require water saving measures through legislation but to make people respect the water they have through prices. It's the perfect incentive for people to consider just how important water is to them.
I work in the water treatment business, and I've visited water treatment plants all over North America. The thing that is common to all water supplies is that the customers think they have some sort of a "right" to unlimited clean water without sacrifice. They grumble and complain and write woefully misinformed letters to their newspapers when the local water company attempts to raise rates to cover infrastructure improvements or cost-of-living salary increases.
What people don't see is that treating water to make it drinkable costs money. If you could see the way water infrastructure in the U.S. and Canada is degrading and how the water industry (especially production and distribution companies) are being forced to ignore staffing and capital improvement needs just because their customers vote for the government to force low rates, you'd understand.
If water prices were allowed to fluctuate more realistically, people wouldn't waste so much of it. Really, in the U.S. and Canada, people pay over US$1.00 for a silly little bottle of water that isn't even guaranteed to have as good quality as tapwater, and then they balk at rate increases of a few pennies per thousand gallons!
If water prices more accurately reflected the true costs of production and distribution, people would think twice about watering their desert lawns. They'd go out and buy water saving appliances on their own, since it would directly translate into savings on their next water bill.
The only thing compulsory water conservation accomplishes is building a bloated bureaucracy of bill checkers, house inspectors and intrusions into the private lives of citizens. Realistic water rates encourage conservation, reduce the load on local governments who have to redirect resources from fire departments, roads, etc., to enforcement of water use regulations, and above all, give consumers more respect for the vital natural resource they've been pouring down the drain ever since Roman times.
