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Every water utility leader and tap water user should have this book. Reading The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is — as its hefty title implies — a commitment of time, energy, and attention. It is worth the effort.
Co-authors Manny Teodoro, Samantha Zuhlke, and David Switzer argue that successful provision of basic services, such as drinking water, is inextricably tied to trust in democratic government. When governments fail to provide such services, either directly or through regulatory oversight, citizens will seek those services elsewhere. What’s more, the authors demonstrate that water service failures are “contagious,” resulting in unearned distrust in the tap water provided by agencies with sterling records of high-quality service. Those who profit from this distrust are bottled water companies and urban water kiosk vendors, selling a less regulated and more expensive product to those who often can least afford it.
Combining detailed research and survey data with economics, social science, psychology, and political theory, the authors articulate, graphically illustrate, and examine supporting evidence for each stage of what they call the “vicious cycle of distrust” in tap water and other basic services. In this self-perpetuating water industry death spiral, failure to provide healthy tap water leads to citizens’ disengagement and their retreat to the commercial water market, resulting in reduced incentives for governments to improve the public water services they need. Even with a pattern so grim, however, the authors thankfully emphasize that the cycle can be reversed, turned from vicious to virtuous, once citizen-consumers regain trust in their tap water and their government.
One of the book’s unique elements is its intense focus on urban water kiosks. After providing an overview and helpful maps in the Introduction, the authors describe in Chapters 3 and 6 their (and their students’) work in identifying and analyzing the locations of kiosks with overlapping socioeconomic data and water service areas. What they reveal is an eye-opening correlation between tap water failure, political marginalization, and commercial water demand.
Sensitive to their own academic tone and the weight of the water policy content, the authors take pains to guide readers to relevant highlights, even warning water professionals away from the overtly theoretical Chapter 2 (which I still enjoyed wading through). For those less entertained by microeconomic formula graphs, I recommend the following navigational guide:
- Chapter 1: An overview of the book’s argument (see “Argument in Brief” section).
- Chapter 2 (near the end, past the theoretical material): A summary of the eight hypotheses, unfolded in subsequent chapters, supporting the book’s overall thesis.
- Chapters 3, 4 ,and 6 (portions): Focused descriptions of the widespread impact of the Flint water crisis and alienated southern Black, Appalachian, and southwestern Hispanic communities.
- “The Plan: Better Water for a More Perfect Union”: Twelve recommended reforms for the tap water industry.
In response to “The Plan,” I do take issue with recommended Reform #1, which is a wholesale consolidation of water service providers. Bigger is not always better, as the customers of California’s electric utility behemoths can attest to, and small-to-medium-sized water utilities can be fully and more democratically responsive to their constituents while meeting the highest regulatory standards. As the authors state five pages earlier, “local governments remain the most effective implementers of basic services.” For similar reasons, I also question Reform #11 to expand the jurisdiction of state public utility commissions over government-owned water utilities; in California, county local agency formation commissions already ensure, where needed, the transparency and accountability of local governments.
Tap water may be this book’s subject, but democracy is at its heart. The authors are explicit that citizens’ faith in a democratic form of government relies on the success of those governments in providing for basic needs, with none more basic than water. They suggest that “[p]erhaps the most intimate relationship between citizen and government takes form in the liquid that flows through taps,” and that solving our tap water challenges are both achievable and vital to our union. Saving water to save ourselves — not a bad product label to place on our pipes — is certainly a timely argument.
Executives and elected leaders overseeing retail water service should keep this book on their shelves, and refer to it often. Woven into its complicated, if at times eggheaded argument is the kernel of our water craft, the core of the service we provide.
