Living with Water Scarcity

A short, deliberately non-technical book arguing that most water shortages are pricing failures rather than physical ones. Zetland’s organizing distinction is between water for people — a small volume, sensibly treated as a right and delivered cheaply — and water for profit, where agriculture and industry take the overwhelming majority and where charging nothing for a scarce input guarantees it will be wasted. The second half works through the mechanisms that would allocate it instead: tiered tariffs, tradable rights, auctions, environmental flows bought rather than mandated, and the political economy that keeps all of them out.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s institutions and public administration section beside Ostrom — the applied case, where governing a shared resource stops being a general theory and becomes a question about a particular river.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Evolution of Institutions and Public Administration. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Water — the resource in question.
• Water Rights — the allocation mechanism the book argues for.
• Price — the signal it says is missing.
• Incentives — why free water gets wasted.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.