Econ-Atrocity: Should water assets and services be privatized or publicly managed?

by Dollars and Sense

Should water assets and services be privatized or publicly managed?
By Amit Basole, CPE Staff Economist
An Econ-Atrocity, brought to you by the Center for Popular Economics.
April 20, 2006

The "water crisis"
The supply of freshwater is only 2.5% of the world's total water content. Not counting the part that is permanently ice and snow, about 1% remains for human needs. In recent times, due to increasing industrial and agricultural demands and growing urbanization, water consumption has grown twice as fast as the world’s population. When combined with wasteful use and massive pollution, these factors make clean, safe freshwater a scarce resource. Already, an estimated 2 billion people across the globe lack access to adequate and clean water. As a result, water has been called the "oil of the 21st century" and the CIA expects inter-country conflicts over water to rise in the coming decade or so.

The corporate solution to the crisis
This water crisis has come at a time when the neoliberal economic model, with its fanatical belief in the free market, is globally ascendant. The predictable solution, since water can now be treated as a scarce resource, is to let market forces of supply and demand decide the "right price" for it. This has led to the privatization of water provision services or the outright sale of water assets, like lakes, rivers and ground water sources, to private companies. As a result, a vital resource that has until now been a part of the ecological commons, has been turned into a commodity - something for sale in order to make a profit. The world water industry already rakes in profits equal to 40% of those of the oil industry. The stakes are extremely high when you consider that only 5-10% of the world’s water is currently in private hands. In the United States, private water companies currently serve approximately 15% of the population (the remaining being publicly served) and increasingly the trend is towards more privatization.
According to the Water Science and Technology Board (WSTB) the main argument for water privatization in the US is that the “magnitude of investments that will be required to continue to provide high-quality, reliable drinking water...to the nation is huge”. Hence, “public officials...are interested in alternatives that may help meet these needs.”
The view of the World Bank is that public subsidies resulting in low water prices encourage its wasteful use and merely shift the burden of paying for the water on to governments. These costs leave governments unable to finance the water pipes, tunnels etc. so urgently needed by the poor in the urban shantytowns and small rural farms of the developing world. Thus shutting the private sector completely out of water services will only prevent the poor from getting access to the water they need. With the blessings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a few large multinational corporations have begun to fight the "water wars" for greater access to the Third World water market.

Is there some truth to the neoliberal view?
Are governments everywhere indeed so strapped for cash that they can no longer afford to guarantee their citizens affordable and clean water? Will privatization lead to more efficient water management systems and lower prices due to competition? The 1990s saw a series of high-profile failures of privatized water management to deliver safe, cheap water to poor communities. For example, in Bolivia's third largest city Cochabamba, in 1999, when a subsidiary of the US-based Bechtel Corporation was entrusted with the city's water supply, the price of water doubled and tripled. Bolivians earning $100 a month were asked to pay $30 a month for water. The logic of the market was simple. Only those who could afford to buy water would get it. Recent experience with deregulation and privatization of many previously public utilities has shown that the private sector can be much more inefficient, wasteful and corrupt than government bodies. Moreover, in the case of a vital environmental resource like water, long-term ecological issues of sustainability and conservation are important. When faced with depletion of a water source, a profit-driven corporation is likely to simply move to newer sources.
As for the argument that governments do not have the resources to make investments in water infrastructure or to subsidize water supply to low-income households, one look at the huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy in the U.S. shows the true priorities of conservative budgets and policies. Across the world, many governments forced to adopt neoliberal policies as a result of pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, have consistently found the resources, amidst cutbacks in spending, to pursue military adventures, nuclear arms races etc.

The mounting resistance and the alternative
The battle lines have been drawn. Our demand should not be increased private sector involvement in water management. Nor should it be the continuation of bureaucratized and corrupt state-run facilities. We need more efficient and democratic public or community management of this essential common resource. Popular struggles in the Third World against the neoliberal privatization agenda have already shown the way. When faced with outrageous water bills, the citizens of Cochabamba, Bolivia, agitated successfully to reverse the government's decision. Examples of successful community-managed water systems are also growing in number. Turning water into a commodity to be sold for profit is wrong ethically, environmentally and socially. It speaks volumes about neoliberal ideology that something "right" in terms of profitability can be so wrong on all these other counts.

Sources:
1. The Privatization of Water, Nexus Magazine, vol 8, no.3
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/ articles/waterprivat.html
2. Summary of monograph, "World Water Resources At The Beginning of the 21st Century", prepared in the framework of IHP, UNESCO. http://espejo.unesco.org.uy/summary/html/summary.html
3. Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts, http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/globaltrends2015/index.html
4. Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, "Who owns water", Nation September 2, 2002, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/barlow
5. Water Services, http://www.privatization.org/database/policyissues/water_local.html
6. Bolivia's War over Water, The Democracy Center, http://www.democracyctr.org/waterwar/#11
7. Privatization of Water Services in the United States: An Assessment of Issues and Experience (2002) Water Science and Technology Board, http://www.nap.edu/books/0309074444/html/
8. Reclaiming Public Water: Achievements, struggles and visions from around the world, Corporate Europe Observatory.
© 2006 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are the work of their authors and reflect their author's opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

The Center for Popular Economics is a collective of political economists based in Amherst, Massachusetts. CPE works to demystify economics by providing workshops and educational materials to activists throughout the United States and around the world. If you would like more information about CPE please visit our website at www.populareconomics.org.

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5/22/2006 03:48:00 PM 0 comments

 

Econamici: Tax Cuts for the Rich Hurt the Economy

by Polly Cleveland

Congress just donated another $70 billion in investment tax cuts to rich taxpayers. Last month, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times summed up the debate: (Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments)

"Stephen J. Entin, president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, a Washington organization, and other supporters of the cuts said they did not go far enough because the more money the wealthiest had to invest, the more would go to investments that produce jobs. For investment income, Mr. Entin said, "the proper tax rate would be zero."

Opponents say the cuts are too generous to those who already have plenty. Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, the senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said after seeing the new figures that "these tax cuts are beyond irresponsible" when "we're in a war; we haven't fixed Social Security or Medicare; we've got record deficits.""

Republicans promise growth and jobs; Democrats just grumble. Yet in fact, the Republican claim depends on two false assumptions: first that the tax cuts will improve incentives to invest and create jobs, and second that tax cuts should go to the rich because the rich save and invest more.

Incentives.

If we cut taxes for the rich, either A) we raise other taxes or B) we increase debt or C) we cut spending. A), B) and C) have incentive effects too; we must consider net incentives.

A tax cut for the rich has minimal incentive effect. That's because much income at the top is "passive." Corporate shareowners can't increase their capital gains if tax rates fall--though they may change their tax accounting.

What about incentive effects of A), B) and C)? A) At the Federal level, an increase in other taxes means higher payroll and income taxes. These taxes drive a "wedge" between employers and employees, penalizing job creation. B) An increase in debt eventually drives up interest rates, to the benefit of capital-owners--major corporations and wealthy individuals--and the detriment of capital-borrowers--small businesses and poorer individuals. Small businesses provide far more employment per dollar of assets than do large businesses. C) As for cutting spending, a cut in military and other pork would surely goose the economy, but that's not what Republicans have in mind. Cutting spending on health and education and pensions reduces middle and lower income citizens' ability and willingness to build the economy by working and investing.

Net effect: cutting taxes on the wealthy reduces incentives for investing and creating jobs.

Savings and Investment.

The rich supposedly save and invest a higher share of income, so that a transfer of income from poor to rich should increase net saving and investment in the economy. Now unquestionably the rich save and invest proportionally more through the markets, that is, by purchasing financial instruments like stocks and bonds and money market funds. These days, they're lucky to earn 3 to 7% on such investments.

But people also "self" save and invest. A young person goes to school, effectively saving the income he or she could have earned in order to invest it in learning valuable skills. The immigrant shopkeeper works day and night, living on crumbs, to grow her little venture. She's building "sweat equity." So are the customers of Home Depot. Since we can't easily measure "self" saving and investment we can't be sure that the rich truly save and invest a higher share.

However--and here's the key point--poorer people get a higher return on their investment! That may seem surprising, given that they can't afford fancy investment advisors. But "self" investments like an education, or a small shop, or a do-it-yourself bathroom renovation, can yield very high returns--precisely because poorer investors find capital scarce and expensive. "Human capital" guru Gary Becker once estimated the return on a college education at 11% to 13%. Estimates of return on high school education run around 18%; over 40% for an 8th grade education. The investments of the shopkeeper and the bathroom renovator must at least repay the 20% interest on a credit card.

So, does poorer people's higher return on investment outweigh a (possibly) lower savings rate? Absolutely. Fifty years ago, Asian "tigers" like South Korea and Taiwan were poor, very unequal, war-damaged agrarian economies. But unlike poor, unequal, backward countries in Latin America, the "tigers" redistributed land to the peasants, and invested massively in public health and education. Overnight they created a middle class, and set off rapid economic growth. Throughout the world, countries with a large middle class grow faster than very unequal countries.

A Message:

Tax cuts for the rich neither improve incentives nor increase saving and investment--quite the opposite. Our hard-working heavy-investing middle class built this country. We can have fair tax policies that also create jobs and growth.

---

Polly Cleveland polly@mcleveland.org is an economist and ED of the Association for Georgist Studies. Econamici is her occasional column.

 

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5/13/2006 05:59:00 PM 0 comments

 

Connecticut commentator considers land tax

by Dollars and Sense

In Repopulating New Orleans (D&S, Mar/Apr 2006) , Mason Gaffney set San Francisco's rebuilding after its 1907 earthquake and fire as a model for present-day New Orleans:

How did a city with so few assets raise funds to repair its broken infrastructure and rise from its ashes? It had only the local property tax, and much of this tax base was burned to the ground. The answer is that it taxed the ground itself, raising money while also kindling a new kind of fire under landowners to get on with it or get out of the way.

In the April 30 Hartford Courant, columnist Tom Condon saw in Gaffney's ideas a remedy for a more prosaic sort of disaster: Hartford's declining population of young adults. He noted, "Hartford buildings are taxed about three times more than the land on which they sit," with the result that:

Connecticut lost 132,000 people between the ages of 25 and 34, nearly 23 percent of the total, between 1990 and 2000, according to census figures. A major reason the young adults are looking at Connecticut in the rear view mirror is that they can't afford a house here.

The response of state developers to this need has been to build suburban McMansions and lots of over-55 "active adult" housing. In other words, we've been serving the people preparing to leave the workforce, not those who want to enter it.

This year, Connecticut's Generally Assembly has considered a bill that would have allowed cities with populations of 80,000 or more to tax land at a higher rate than buildings, but Condon reported that it seemed likely to fail. Which, he wrote,

is unfortunate. Cities should have the option to try the land tax. If nothing else, homeowners won't be penalized for fixing up their properties. The idea also promotes what ought to be a principal planning goal in the state—carefully increasing density in city and town centers and along transit corridors. This would encourage affordable housing, which in turn would help the economy.

Read the rest here: http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-plccondon10430.artapr30,0,4561370.column

Technorati Tags: land tax, Henry George, Connecticut, nola,

 

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5/11/2006 12:06:00 PM 0 comments

 

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN NEW ORLEANS?
COMMON GROUND COLLECTIVE at UMASS BOSTON

by Ben Greenberg

A friend of mine who is a student at UMass passed this announcement on to me.

When: Thursday, May 11 from noon to 2:00 p.m.

Where: UMass Boston Wheatley Hall Student Lounge, Room 0148, 4th Floor


Please stop by for as little or as much time as you can!


Adjunct Dispute Resolution Professor Phil Woodbury, who has spent time working in post-Katrina New Orleans, will introduce the work of the Common Ground Collective. Also present will be a long-term Common Ground
volunteer and a lifelong resident of the 9th ward. They will speak about the storm, the failed government response, and Common Ground's work.

Common Ground's mission is to provide short term relief for victims of hurricane disasters in the gulf coast region, and long term support in rebuilding the communities affected in the New Orleans area. Common Ground is a community-initiated volunteer organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support. The work gives hope to communities by working with them, providing for their immediate needs and emphasizes people working together to rebuild their lives in sustainable ways.

Common Ground was founded by New Orleans residents immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of volunteers have been mobilized to provide hurricane relief and long term organizing in New Orleans and surrounding areas. In addition to providing water, food, clothing and other emergency services, Common Ground has established a free medical clinic with two satellite centers, helped gut and clean churches, houses, and schools, prevented bulldozing in areas of the 9th Ward, established an after-school program, and much more.


Please come with your curiosity and your questions. Learn more about Common Ground at www.commongroundrelief.org

Technorati Tags: activism, katrina, nola

 

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5/10/2006 09:40:00 PM 0 comments

 

A dark night, a mysterious dame, and a gumshoe looking for clues in the case of the vanishing wages

by Anonymous

From Jared Bernstein's May 7 op ed in the LA Times.

"OK, gorgeous. Drop the 'two Americas' line and give it to me straight. You know as well as I do where the growth is going. What's your game?"

She nibbled her lip and looked up at me real sweet. "I suppose if I told you I'm just a girl who cares about the bottom 99%, you wouldn't believe me."

She supposed right. ... She was Milton Friedman with the body of Scarlett Johansson. I had to get outta there.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-bernstein7may07,0,4131549.story

Technorati Tags: real wages, inequality, economics

 

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5/09/2006 08:11:00 AM 0 comments

 

The Wealth of Nations, Wolf on Jacobs, Krugman on Warsh

by Dollars and Sense

By Polly Cleveland


Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, calls Jane Jacobs, who died last week, "a self-educated intellectual of astonishing originality." He devotes most of his article, "National wealth on city life's coat tails" http://news.ft.com/cms/s/352033dc-da02-11da-b7de-0000779e2340.html to a review of one of his and my favorite books, Jacob's 1984 Cities and the Wealth of Nations -- which he sees as a direct challenge to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Jacobs, like Smith, rarely lets theory trump observation. And what a different world she observes from that of conventional economics! Economic growth happens, not at the national level, but in cities. "According to Jacobs, cities grow through explosive import-replacement. These new products then become their exports, which finance more imports. The expansion that derives from city import-replacement generates five sources of growth: enlarged markets for imports; increased numbers and kinds of jobs; increased transplants of city work into non-urban locations; new uses for technology, particularly to increase rural production and productivity; and growth of city-owned capital for investment in the city and elsewhere."

Cities have largely stumped economic model-builders: what to do with economies of scale in infrastructure, economies of cooperation and communication, positive externalities of ideas and energy? Which brings me to David Warsh's new book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, reviewed by Paul Krugman in the Sunday New York Times: "The Pin Factory Mystery," www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/books/review/07krugman.html.

As Krugman relates, Warsh addresses a contradiction in Adam Smith: In the first pages of the Wealth of Nations, Smith celebrates the pin factory, where division of labor and economies of scale allow ten workers to make thousands of times more pins a day than they could working separately. Smith goes on to celebrate the market, which allows the same division of labor and economies of scale to proceed on a grand scale, engaging thousands of enterprises in the production of a single good.

The contradiction? It takes many competitors to make markets function. Yet if firms face increasing returns to scale, they will consolidate into monopolies. So to maintain a theory of competitive markets, model-builders have felt forced to assume that firms face diminishing returns to scale--banishing the pin factory to "an 'underground river' in economic thought."

In Warsh's account, recent developments in growth theory have resolved the contradiction. Krugman writes, "Economists had finally found ways to talk about the Pin Factory with the rigor needed to make it respectable. One after another, fields from industrial organization to international trade to economic development and urban economics were transformed."

I am only slightly familiar with this literature. However, I long ago resolved the contradiction, at least to my own satisfaction, in models for my dissertation: I assumed that diseconomies of scale in supervision ultimately overpower technological economies of scale, setting limits on firm size. I look forward to Warsh's book.

Technorati Tags: Jane Jacobs, economics

 

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5/08/2006 09:45:00 AM 0 comments

 

Jane Jacobs and John Kenneth Galbraith

by Anonymous

Last week was a grim one for my apartment's non-fiction shelves—the two authors whose complete works, each volume thumb-worn, graced them, died: on Tuesday, Jane Jacobs, at 87, and on Sunday, John Kenneth Galbraith, at 97.

Jacobs, in contrast to the urban planners of the 1950s—in contrast to her nemesis Robert Moses—championed an intensely human model for living among others. Not for her the civil engineer's dream of soaring superhighway ramps—her Death and Life of Great American Cities finds beauty instead in thriving neighborhoods with living streets, familiar faces, local businesses. Places in which to work, play, live, and dream. Cities and the Wealth of Nations applies the same humane vision to the problems of national economies in the 1970s and early 1980s, arguing that businesses in isolation from human life—think both suburban office parks and special economic zones—don't live up to their potential. They may produce, but they don't innovate well and they certainly don't contribute much to the places they happen to be located. And Jacobs strengthens her criticism by offering an alternative model of economic development based on careful observation of existing vibrant economies. Jacobs' works are essential reading for everyone who struggles against corporate globalization and its disregard for its effects on the human scale.

As, too, are John Kenneth Galbraith's works. Galbraith applied a similar humanity to economics, though on a larger scale than Jacobs. His best-known book, The Affluent Society, displayed his concern for the ill effects of inequality, especially in times and places of great overall wealth. It was a concern that he held throughout his career, and one that his son, James K. Galbraith, continues to study. But Galbraith's concept of inequality went further than inequality of wealth or income—he was also concerned with inequality of power. The New Industrial State explores the structures that allow corporations to concentrate power without accountability, and both that book and Economics and the Public Purpose offer Galbraith's solution to the problem—maintaining a countervailing power in the form of unions, other citizens' organizations, and good government.

Both Jacobs and Galbraith refuted the neoliberal vision of sovereign economies and worked against the policies it entails. The proponents of that vision and those policies tout them as increasing human freedom, but theirs is a very narrow vision of freedom. Neoliberal policies do promote grand enterprise. But when the world operates at heroic scale, only heroes can operate in the world. Jacobs and Galbraith both devoted their lives to bringing the context of our lives back down to a human scale. Canadian critic Robert Fulford wrote, "Jacobs came down firmly on the side of spontaneous inventiveness of individuals, as against abstract plans imposed by governments and corporations." Galbraith had more faith in government, as the chosen representative of the people, but the spirit of his work was much the same. The world is poorer for both their absences.

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5/03/2006 09:44:00 AM 0 comments

 

May Day: The Workers’ Day!

by Dollars and Sense

An "Econ-Atrocity" from the Center for Popular Economics
By Gerald Friedman, CPE Staff Economist
May 1, 2006

For over a century May Day has been celebrated throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America, as a day of labor celebration marked with strikes and with parades flying red flags and waving revolutionary banners. In Europe, May Day has been celebrated in this way since 1890. Answering a call by the newly-formed Socialist International, labor rallies were held throughout Europe on May 1, 1890 to demand the 8-hour day. A quarter million people marched in London’s Hyde Park, joining workers throughout France, Germany, and other countries who joined together in the world’s first international day of labor protest. Two French militants, Raymond Lavigne and Jean Dormoy, suggested May 1, 1890 as the date for this campaign because that was the date chosen by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) for its campaign for the 8-hour day. It might seem odd, but this international celebration of labor’s power was inspired by the American labor movement; May Day, the revolutionary holiday, began in the United States.

The AFL’s call for demonstrations on May Day 1890 was the second time the organization had launched a May Day campaign. The first, the world’s first May Day, was in 1886, and it led to disasters from which the American labor movement has never fully recovered. At the 1884 convention of the AFL’s ancestor, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), the 18 delegates in attendance voted a resolution declaring simply that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886.” The FOTLU was a poor candidate to inaugurate this movement. Formed in 1881 as a counterweight to the more militant Knights of Labor (KOL), the FOTLU had few resources to commit to the campaign; and the KOL jealously refused to join. But the idea of a united national campaign to win a shorter work day was so attractive that it inspired local activists throughout the country. Rallying to the banner of labor unity, workers throughout the country rushed into unions and joined strikes. Union membership almost tripled in 1886, including new unions among African-American sugar workers in Louisiana, migrant timber workers of the Pacific Northwest, and female office clerks in the urban Northeast. The number of strikers in 1886, over 500,000, almost equaled the total for the preceding four years. Half of these strikers were in the first week of May alone. On May 1st, 11,000 Detroiters marched, 5,000 paraded in Troy, New York, 10,000 in Milwaukee, 6,000 white and black in Louisville, Kentucky. The epicenter of the Mayday events and the radical labor movement, Chicago, was nearly closed by the Mayday strikes.

So powerful was the May Day movement that some commentators warned that the Labor Movement would soon transform America. But such forecasts had not counted on American business. In Chicago, employers and the police adopted an aggressive stance against the strikers. On May 3, police killed several strikers while clearing a path for strike-breakers to enter the McCormick Reaper Works. Labor leaders called a protest meeting for the following evening (May 4) was to be held in at the Haymarket Square. Just as the meeting was dispersing, someone threw a bomb at the police, killing seven officers; surviving officers charged the crowd with guns blazing, killing at least seven workers, maybe more.

Hysteria about anarchist bombings went national, provoking the nation’s first red scare. Police and employers took license from the events to arrest and beat up labor activists. The Chicago labor movement was devastated. Public meetings, the life blood of an active labor movement, were banned and police raided union offices, seizing documents and rounding-up activists. Eight Chicago movement leaders were arrested and tried for murder for involvement in the bombing. The trial was a farce--the state never produced evidence directly linking the defendants to the bombing but it still secured convictions of all eight and sentences of death for seven. A travesty of justice, a judicial murder, the convictions were appealed to no avail to the Illinois Supreme Court and then the United States Supreme Court. Four defendants, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer, were hung on November 11, 1887.

The hanging of the Haymarket martyrs provoked a wave of international indignation. But among practical minded labor activists in the United States, it provoked a reconsideration of the martyrs’ radical political agenda and union program. Instead of labor radicalism and solidarity, American unions learned that to survive in a hostile environment they needed to adopt a more conservative politics and narrow craft-union orientation. European observers noted that the AFL called for another May Day demonstration for 1890; what they missed was that the 1890 demonstrations were to be confined to a single craft, the carpenters, in hopes of avoiding a general strike like 1886 and the subsequent repression.

Today, Haymarket and the events in Chicago 1886 still resonate. The Haymarket rebels left an enduring memory of martyrdom embedded in labor lore around the world. This was predicted by one of the martyrs, August Spies, whose last words are remembered long after his accusers are forgotten: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”

Sources:
Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, 1984).

Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements (New York, 1958).

Philip Foner, May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886-1986 (New York, 1986).

Gerald Friedman, State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1886-1914 (Ithaca, New York, 1998).

James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York, 2006).
© 2006 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are the work of their authors and reflect their author's opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

The Center for Popular Economics is a collective of political economists based in Amherst, Massachusetts. CPE works to demystify economics by providing workshops and educational materials to activists throughout the United States and around the world. If you would like more information about CPE please visit our website at www.populareconomics.org.

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5/01/2006 12:40:00 PM 1 comments