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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Why not just price water to reflect supply realities?

Why would anyone care about saving water when it's so dirt cheap? "Awareness" seems like a waste of time in comparison.

Exactly. My father in law lives in a town that has no water metering (and usually, but not always, plenty of water). In the summer he puts his sprinklers in 2 or 3 times a day, even when dire warnings are issued about water consumption. Human behavior is all about the impact on the back pocket (particularly if you are a pensioner).

Where does he live?

Serious question. I'd be interested in whether or not his behavior is a function of living in an area drowning in fresh water sources?

If he does not live in such an area, then I'm really interested in how the municipality is able to keep the price of water that low? That would seem to defy the rule of supply and demand in my mind.

He's not in the US, but in a town of 160K-odd people, with a very decent river running right through.

Water is indeed very cheap, but the main thing is that there's no metering. Metering is seen by some as taking away their rights, and possibly leading the elderly/poor to skimp on water and thus hygiene - so there is considerable resistance to water metering. It's not a sustainable position though (because of people like him :) and metering must arrive one day.

Most places in the Northeast have an abundance of water, and water rates mostly fund infrastructure. For example, NYC only began metering water usage in 1986.

Does market economics work if there's no way to prevent the tragedy of the commons?

That's a confusing question. The tragedy of the commons happens specifically when a resource is under- or un-priced.

If a free market is left alone to set prices, do any resources end up under-priced?

No- but that presupposes the existence of a well functioning free market, which everyone agrees we do not have with water.

It's not a confusing question. The tragedy of the commons happens when a company or person abuses a resource that is provided for the good of all. We can look at any company and realize that compared to an average individual the pollution and resource consumption is crazy.

The problem with industry is that everything is value added but nobody looks at externalities sufficiently or value subtracted.

The key is to 'sell' or 'gift' the property rights to the resources that were previously part of the commons (and to a party that can economically protect their new asset).

I'm hoping one day something like that will happen with fisheries, e.g. someone will own fisheries or maybe even schools of fish. Anything less seems doomed to tragedy.

Note that government management of a previously 'commons' resource is, in theory, the same basic arrangement. In practice tho, the very different incentives shaping government organizations doesn't seem to as reliably protect resources as for private entities.

('Markets fail'. Governments fail too. What's the expected difference in the rate of failure of the two?)

This is the most important question of our era.

A lot of people outside of cities have their own groundwater wells, which is at least part of what the article is talking about. How do you price water people are pulling directly from the ground with their own equipment?

Aren't water wells permitted? In that case, you simply require a meter, ideally the cellular or zigbee sort. I'm sure there would be water bandits but it doesn't seem totally impossible.

Hang on, you want me to pay the local government for water under my land that they don't treat or pump for me? You're going to have to adjust some property laws in the US (and at least England and Canada I would guess) to do that.

I thought surface rights and water rights were already unbundled in a lot of US states.

Rain barrels are/were illegal in a lot of US areas because you didn’t own the water that landed on your property.

Wait, what now? Read that out loud and consider the idea that rain waters my lawn for free regardless of whether I have a barrel.

Holy good God it’s not totally fabricated. https://www.truthorfiction.com/collecting-rainwater-is-illeg...

Beneath your land is also a fiction, it takes hundreds of years to accumulate and stretches far beyond the boundaries of your land.

Yeah your house and property sits above a subterranean _lake_. You can't just pull water out of a lake as you please. You shouldm't be able to pull out ground water as you please either.

Look, it's not my pet project, I'm just pointing out that if we decided we needed to track groundwater usage for whatever reason- price, allocation, whatever- it could probably be reasonably done.

There is no reason at all you can't put a meter on a well. None. Everything to do that exists.

I assure you that you will have a very difficult time enforcing permit rules anywhere that is not dense enough to have town water.

Who knows, farmers understand that they essentially compete with their neighbor for groundwater, so maybe they would police eachother & ensure that everyone plays fair & had a meter. Just dreaming.

It's one of the applications for zoning in rural areas.

My parents live in an area where there is no municipal water system. Due to the geology for both water supply and septic systems, they mandate a minimum lot size of 4 acres.

I can’t speculate too much without knowing where, but it sounds more like regulatory capture to prevent development.

With conservation, rainwater collection, gray water re-use, incinerating/composting toilets and/or engineered septic fields, a lot can be done without a lot of groundwater or usable natural septic field.

It’s in the middle of nowhere. My neighbor was the mayor who implemented it, with the goal of encouraging development.

Encouraging development with minimum lot sizes of 4 acres?

Or simply charge more for the license itself.

You 'sell' or 'gift' the rights to all groundwater in a suitably defined watershed and that controlling entity sets prices (and at least partially enforces their rights). The controlling entity could be a government organization. A private organization would need either some kind of cooperative police apparatus (with the ability to detect, and stop, violations of the controlling entity's rights to the groundwater).

Doing so would probably make poor people die of dehydration as scarcity increases. Those with the means to drill their own wells will do so, especially if there is a strong commercial incentive. We already saw this play out in past years in california as individual humans faced onerous water restrictions while big agro continued to grow almonds using the same water supply. Bringing symmetry to regulations should be the first priority before any further burden is placed on individuals.

Because we as a society have decided that we are all better off if it's cheap enough that poor people can still use it on a whim. Of course this results in some people over-using but we think that's less of a problem.

I don’t know about the rest of the US, but in SF water pricing is tiered. A small amount costs x per gallon. A larger amount costs 2x per gallon. And even larger amount costs 4x per gallon, etc.

Unfortunately the rich can still abuse this, as it’s not actually proportionate to income. I wish more public fees were, like speeding tickets, car registration costs, etc, so that rich/poor impact was more normalized.

N.B. The multipliers are illustrative and not the actual numbers.

Tiered pricing seems like a decent compromise.

Scaled pricing is stupid. I didn't work my ass off climbing the ladder just to get screwed out of the same fraction of my money by the government as when I brought home a few hundred a week. If you want to cut the poor a break then make fees and fines tax deductible.

Ahhhh, I want a gold classism card as well. Climbing the ladder is a choice that the rest of shouldn't have to bear. Your choice, your price.

Artificial suppression of water prices is equivalent to a direct cash transfer proportional to water usage. The more water you waste, the more money you get.

The exact same thing (making the poor able to afford water) could be accomplished much less destructively by making the cash transfer a flat constant (thereby not incentivizing gratuitous water wastage).

Great idea. Then when the air gets dirty we can just charge people for purified air.

That's not a reasonable comparison. A more realistic one would be to tax anything that pollutes the air to compensate for the cost of purifying it. Which is a great idea.

I get that you're being facetious. But if purified air became sufficiently expensive, and it was the only way to breathe, everyone really would get serious about polluting less.

Would they? The whole point of a polluted commons is that no one actor is able to make an impact from their own choices. Only collective action can make a difference, and that requires an enforceable agreement to cooperate plus enforcement to make sure that no one cheats.

In a world of unbreatheable air, the most rational individual action is not to reduce polluting; rather, it's to pollute as hard as possible in order to make lots of money with which to buy purified air.

> Only collective action can make a difference,

But how do you motivate collective action and fight apathy? High prices are one way to do it.

Do you care about saving petrol?

Being able to "price" something requires existence of a functional market.

Markets can only exist when contracts can be enforced.

Being able to enforce a contract requires monitoring and ability to issue fines, you also needs appropriate laws.

All of the above does not exist when it comes to ground water harvesting - especially in India and even in a police state like China.

If it makes you feel any better, California is perfectly capable of doing all that, but they still don't, and are stuck in a tragedy-of-the-commons type water shortage where farmers will gladly waste $1 of water to produce 5 cents of crops, because the alternative is to get nothing.

Additionally, if they don't waste $1 of water to produce $0.05 of crops & do nothing with it instead, they lose the water rights next year.

Yet companies build plants on the Great Lakes, hoover up all the water, filter it, bottle it, and sell it to the unsuspecting, who happily buy it.

I never ever saw bottled water as a kid in Europe. It wasn't until I moved to the US where it appeared to be commonplace. When I went back home to England last year, they've got it in every supermarket I visited. Sad, really. I still just drink out of the tap here in Texas.

What you wrote about bottled water not being a thing in Europe is definitely country specific. When I lived in Germany none of my German friends drank water from the tap. They would buy packs of bottled water for drinking at home.

Depends on where exactly you live.

Much of the US cities have great tap water. Some places (Flint) get lead going on.

However, much of the water in the US by area is well water. Well water tastes gross, and has some dubious health effects if not filtered right. Bottled water seems reasonable for those people.

Just because bottled water is not useful for you, does not mean it's not useful for anyone.

I never said it wasn't useful. Obviously there are people who need it. I just won't pay for it when I already do by paying for house water. Our tap water is clean here in Texas.

Yet companies build plants on the Great Lakes, hoover up all the water, filter it, bottle it, and sell it to the unsuspecting

I can't speak for every state, but here in Michigan (The Great Lakes state!), companies like Nestle have to apply for a license that subjects them to regular inspections to make sure they're not over-burdening the local groundwater supply. They pump from wells on their own private land using their own facilities. Their license fee is pretty cheap, something like $300USD.

This seems like a common-sense regulation that doesn't overly burden either the company or the regulator.

I buy Ice Mountain spring water with a clear conscience.

The aquifers they pump from definitely reach beyond their land. Your con-science shouldn't be so easily manipulated.

I've heard though in Europe it is more common to have sparkling water in restaurants while in the US its plain water (maybe filtered tap water)

The only reason for that is to charge more.

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