Putting less emphasis on engineering

From David Zetland and The End of Abundance: Economic Solutions to Water Scarcity.

I think Zetland makes several good points.  Especially the issue of engineers being more cost conscious than value conscious.  Benefits are much harder to quantify than costs - - incorporating societal value propositions into the cost-benefit matrix is very difficult.

"The typical water manager is a civil engineer who has worked in the industry since leaving university.  He (usually a man) has risen through the ranks, learning how to work with colleagues, political supervisors and others in an organization where the division of labor and hierarchy becomes more formal as the number of employees increases.  These managers use accountants to balance the books and lawyers to handle legal obligations, but their primary job is supplying water their communities need using infrastructure that stores, treats and distributes fresh and wastewater.

In the past of abundant water supply, problems were solved with pipes and pumps, but scarcity has changed matters.  Now pipes compete for the same water, and water management puts less emphasis on engineering.

Engineers, lawyers and economists approach problems in different ways.  Say that a city faces water shortages while nearby farmers flood their fields to grow low value crops.  An engineer may tell people to use less or drill a well into the aquifer farmers use.  A lawyer may cite a law that gives urban areas priority access to water in shortage or use political power to change the relative seniority's of urban and agricultural water.  Economists might suggest raising the price of urban water so that people use less (cut demand) or buying water from farmers (increase supply).  These differences originate in the tools of each trade.

Engineers are more cost conscious that vale conscious; more oriented to supply than demand; and more familiar with hard infrastructure constraints than soft human choices.  When they raise prices, they do not consider different users' opinions on scarcity, future actions or values.  Lawyers specialize in negotiating and resolving conflict, threading a path between people with rights, contracts and power to a negotiated solution that parties will accept, even if they grumble.

Economists also favor a particular set of tools, but the problem of shortage is central to economics.  When fixed supply is less than demand, prices rise until quantity demanded falls and shortage ends.  Prices are easier to use then limits on customer choices, subsidies for low-flow toilets, reservoir expansion, or taking farmers' water.  Prices rise with scarcity and fall with abundance, reliably matching supply and demand.  Local conditions determine the exact means of shaking thirst, but the underlying mechanism of adjusting prices has worked for millennia."