[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.]

As we’ve seen so far in this extended series on the economics of water taking off from Duke law professor Jim Salzman’s article Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water, since housing is what makes cities, infrastructure – at its most basic, water and sanitation – is necessary for cities to scale upward.  The quintessential expanding city, New York, had to reinvent its water infrastructure repeatedly.

5.         Infrastructure is vulnerable to man-made calamity

As with Rome, urbanization and infrastructure spur innovations in technology.  Aqueducts could flow water only downhill, but James Watt’s steam engine meant water would be pumped uphill too.

In 1774 the city approved an ambitious plan for a steam engine-powered waterworks that would pump water throughout the city in aqueducts similar to those of Rome. 

Technological networks, be they paved roads, canyon-spanning aqueducts, or steam-powered pumps, take capital.

To fund the public works, the city issued “Water Works Money,” the first paper money issued by an American city. 

Finance and infrastructure go hand in hand.

Construction commenced but the timing could not have been worse.  As the colonies descended into the Revolutionary War, the British occupied the city and destroyed the waterworks construction. 

I hope you’re not expecting your wells to survive

Following the Revolutionary War, water supply plans in the city stumbled along for over 15 years.  Plans were proposed for public waterworks and carefully studied, but none funded. 

6.         Growth creates crisis; crisis creates political change

New York kept growing, and the urban water supply (like Rome’s before it) became overloaded:

Water from the Tea Water Pump was of increasingly poor quality, nor did the public wells provide an attractive option. 

By the Enlightenment, the connection between hygiene and disease had been scientifically established, which meant that epidemics also created political pressure – which, in this as in so many other cases, translated into a political commitment to spend tax money.

A yellow fever epidemic struck New York in 1795 and many blamed the disease on the city’s foul water and fouler streets.  Tea Water price was also a major concern.  As a letter to the New York Gazette decried in 1798, “I pay for Tea Water Only About Six Pounds Per Annum; which, I think a great tax for one small opinion.” 

Now that the taxation did imply representation, those paying the taxes were quite reasonably demanding municipal service for it.

With citizens and business leaders demanding action, the city turned to privatization. 

In an alliance that would seem unthinkable years later, Aaron Burr joined with Alexander Hamilton and other prominent politicians of the day to drive through a public/private solution. 

As I’ve written in many contexts, government makes an excellent funder and regulator, but a less effective service provider.

In an argument that would echo 200 years later in privatization debates, “Hamilton used his considerable influence to persuade the City Council that the municipality should not build its own water works because it could not raise sufficient capital through loans and taxes.” 

Smart enough for a very fat biography

As the terrific recent Ron Chernow biography shows, Hamilton was an organizational and financial genius – there’s a reason your ten-dollar bill shows the portrait of the first Secretary of the treasury, the man who more than any other set the United States government’s finances on a proper course.  Though not above making a buck on his own, Hamilton’s logic was very likely sound, especially given the challenges and complexity of municipal finance.

If a buck can be made, why can’t I be the one to make it?

Burr then hurried a bill through the state legislature in three days.  Authorized by the New York state legislature and the New York City Council, the Manhattan Company, as the new organization would be called, was mandated in its corporate charter to provide New York City with clean drinking water. 

The assumption seems to have been that water would be piped in from the Bronx River, since the water sources on Manhattan Island were now regarded as undrinkable. 

While this summary’s sketchy, it suggests that Hamilton had in mind what we would now recognize as the municipal water company, a public utility.

Burr, however, was financially more ambitious.

[Burr] directed only 10% of the Manhattan Company’s $2 million assets toward investments in water works, relying on the Collect as the water source. 

I guess this means we’re not partners any more?

This is more or less stealing, or to use the more polite term, ‘conversion of public moneys to private profit,’ the more reprehensible since the Collect had been overused.

It’s also dangerously unhealthy, as I saw when in Kenya.

Water vendor siphoning paper plant runoff into his tanks

The remainder was invested more profitably in local businesses.   The company did the bare minimum to maintain its charter, laying only 23 miles of pipe in its first 32 years. 

Here’s a classic regulatory problem: how do you keep a chartered private money within its remit?  It’s problem we haven’t solved yet, 225 years later.

Over time, this drinking water company gave up all pretence and developed into the powerful Chase Manhattan Bank.

It all started with a water franchise

From water to money, now that’s liquidity!

Although the company wasn’t improving the water quality, its legal status was a valuable asset:

While few people actually received Manhattan Company water, the company defended its monopoly power over water provision and, as the Manhattan Company’s portfolio grew, Tea Water pumps were driven out of business.  New Yorkers were thus forced to rely on the increasingly-revolting Collect Pond and local wells.  People with money turned to imported soda water and well water mixed with liquor.  As a historian of the era has described,

As for New Yorkers, drinking no more Tea Water and scant Manhattan, it was once again back to street wells and carted spring water. New York had entered the first American century with less good water than the Dutch had bequeathed to the English.

New York, 1842, expanding north

It took a series of disasters for the government to finally address water supply head on. 

7.         Public infrastructure arrived only after full-blown privatized infrastructure failed

Networks are vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons:

We could use some public water about now

In 1828 a large fire caused extensive property damage and a severe cholera epidemic in 1832 killed 3,500 people in New York but only 900 in Philadelphia, which enjoyed reliable public water supply and streets washed down daily.  Mounting concerns over disease and inadequate water sources to fight fires forced the city’s Common Council to revisit the challenge of providing reliable supplies of clean drinking water. 

Following the recommendations of a state-appointed commission, a permanent Board of Water Commissioners was created and authorized [x] to raise infrastructure capital and [y] to condemn land in order to supply water to the city. 

Those are significant powers, especially the latter. 

New York, 1856, still growing, needing more water

Not only is this eminent domain for economic development, it’s acquisitive eminent domain, with the city over-reaching its boundaries.  A hundred years hence, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would dam the Swift River to create the Quabbin Reservoir, in the process drowning several towns.

House being trucked out of the soon-to-be-flooded Swift River Valley

Surprising even today, the condemnation authority extended beyond the boundaries of the city, for the water source lay upstream of New York in Croton.  By 1838, condemnation of 35 acres of land in the Croton watershed had been completed.  The Croton Reservoir was a massive project, supplying 95 million gallons daily, yet only satisfied the city’s water needs for a decade. 

Croton, still used today

The city then looked even farther north, to the Catskills and Delaware watersheds. 

More echoes of Rome: the city kept growing, and its network reached ever farther afield.

Construction of the reservoir in Croton marked the end for significant private provision of drinking water for New Yorkers, since it displaced the Manhattan Company. 

Which, as we’ve seen, happily became a bank.

Interestingly, however, it did not mark the end of water as an unpriced good, for with construction of the Croton Reservoir and the Croton Aqueduct came installation in New York of so-called “Croton Hydrants.”  These fire and street hydrants provided water free of charge and proved very popular. 

Echoes of the lacus.

As a history of Croton water relates, “Two years after it opened, Croton was primarily a public amenity of great fountains and thousands of fire and free street hydrants; most homeowners and landlords had little inclination to install the costly service pipe.” 

As in Rome, we have legalize and tax replacing the informal settlement; or, said in capital terms, the massive public investment in non-recoverable infrastructure costs (the Basic Model) created a valuable network whose incremental hookup costs were small enough that everybody wanted to join.

Formalization, meet municipal utility.

This changed over the next 25 years as private pipes became more common, but the net result bore a fascinatingly strong resemblance to the Roman system of cross-subsidization from private pipes to lacus at the time of Caesar.

8.         The law of economic gravity applies to water

New York makes a great case for studying the economics of municipal infrastructure finance because it recapitulated most of human experience in just two hundred years.  As Professor Salzman says,

How we think of water, whether as a sacred gift or a good for sale, both influences and is influenced by how we manage access to drinking water. 

Or, as I say it – urbanization required technology and networks, which in turn require government and capital, which in turn requires large-scale public and private finance. 

Urbanization is thus, among other things, a phenomenon of money.

New York, the epitome of capitalism, demonstrates how rapidly money power can transform environments. 

That vertical line is a wall …

… which became synonymous with capital markets

Between 1650 and 1850, New York went through three or four different phases.

We had the pre-urban communal use (”always ask, always give”) model:

From its early days, New York’s drinking water came from private wells, public wells, and the Collect. 

When that was over-stressed – a consequence of urbanization – water vendors emerged:

Faced with declining water quality, water became commodified with the rise of Tea Water. 

The limited neighborhood infrastructure was destroyed by a man-made catastrophe (war):

Following the failure to provide public infrastructure after the Revolutionary War, the private supply of drinking water reached its logical next step with responsibility for management of New York’s entire drinking water supply system granted to the Manhattan Company. 

New York granted a fully private monopoly, but that failed for want of regulation and violation of the Basic Model (that government pays the non-recoverable cost):

Only when the company notably failed to provide even the most basic services for drinking water or fire protection did the city step in and occupy the field. 

Rome got to the Basic Model through imperialism; New York got there through desperate necessity.  Two diverse environments converged on the Basic Model.  Is the Basic Model the Holy Grail of infrastructure finance?

I have seen the Holy Grail of water infrastructure!

[Stay tuned for the summation post to come in a few days.]

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As we’ve seen so far in this extended series on the economics of water taking off from Duke law professor Jim Salzman’s article Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water, since housing is what makes cities, infrastructure – at its most basic, water and sanitation – is necessary for cities to scale upward.  Thus the greatest city of antiquity, Rome, was the first to create large-scale municipal infrastructure, and to do it using the Basic Model:

When Rome fell, no similarly urban and civilized city arose for a millennium and a half, and when it did, it spoke English.  Professor Salzman’s article covers both London and New York, but for our purposes, New York is the more interesting as it is a more complete and clear advance on the Roman model in its use of private capital:

The story of New York’s drinking water provides an instructive contrast with Rome.  

Though I’m a confirmed Bostonian and birthright citizen of Red Sox nation, I’ve posted many times about New York, as it is the cradle of apartment living, the birthplace of the co-operative, the last holdout of pernicious and metastasizing rent control, and the inventor of air rights.

1.         From the beginning, water supply constrained New York’s growth

Despite being surrounded by water on three sides, lower Manhattan (the original New Amsterdam) had a very finite supply of water: one pond.

Might make a good investment …

Ever since Peter Minuit’s celebrated purchase of Manhattan Island from the natives for beads and trinkets in 1626, the settlement has faced challenges of ensuring adequate drinking water.  While New York is obviously surrounded by large rivers, they open on the ocean and are too salty for drinking. 

Most of the settlement’s water came from a spring-fed, deep freshwater pond covering 70 acres in lower Manhattan, known as the “Kalch-Hook.” Interestingly, much of the fresh water was used not for direct drinking but, instead, for brewing beer or cooking. 

Does that include infrastructure?

Presumably (Professor Salzman doesn’t say) the communal pond was shared in the same manner as the pre-urban societies he profiled (Jewish, Islamic, African, Indian). 

Then New York grew.

You got any wells inside that Vaubin fort?

2.         Lacking government, there was no public-policy … which proved indefensible

The first Europeans to live in Manhattan, the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, relied on basic technologies to provide drinking water – collecting rainwater in cisterns and digging shallow wells. 

The biggest Dutch city in the New World, 1660

The wells in New Amsterdam were private. 

Private markets will move when government doesn’t.  The colony, thousands of miles from its capital and national resources, had to make do.  In such a case, the greatest asset they had was their settlers’ enterprise and intelligence, and they formed informal markets of their own – just like what happens in today’s slums.

Public well?  What an extravagance!

Although there were plans in 1660 to build a public well, the famed regional governor, Peter Stuyvesant, refused to approve the funding. 

Makes one wonder what the old Dutchman would think of the massive affordable housing property now named after him?

This proved remarkably short-sighted, however, for when British warships sailed up the Hudson in 1664 the Dutch defense was brief.  Besieged in a fort, the Dutch realized to their chagrin that the fort had no wells and therefore no water sources.

“Sir, about those warships …”

Following a quick surrender, which kept the town’s commercial prospects intact, Stuyvesant justified the loss to his employers as not a particularly serious matter since the lack of fresh water on the island made it impossible to defend and easy to regain.

No surprise, then, that one of the first acts of the new British masters, after renaming the city New Yorke, was construction of public wells in the city.  Begun in 1667, these would remain a primary source of water for New Yorkers well into the 19th century. 

While this is a special case, it’s instructive that the municipal infrastructure was seen as a military resource, just as at Masada and elsewhere.

While regarded as public works projects, few public monies were actually spent.  People living on the street where a well had been sited were told to undertake construction on their own. 

Three hundred years later, we’d call that an ‘unfunded mandate’ – and it suffered the usual fate of unfunded mandates:

The plan went nowhere, though, with only one brackish well completed. 

3.         New York reinvented the Basic Model

With water a strategic necessity, and the coercive mandate having failed, the New Yorkers reinvented the Basic Model:

In 1686, construction of eight wells finally got underway through a combination of public funding and financial assessments of families who would be serviced by the well.

As in the modern Basic Model, the capital cost was funded by government, with the operating cost paid by the neighborhood using the resource:

Local residents were charged with ensuring proper maintenance; indeed, some of the wells later became known by the names of these overseers.

New York solved the free-rider problem in a fairly direct way:

People refusing to pay the assessment were threatened with forced sales of goods to make up the shortfall. 

The Basic Model proved durable, lasting a full century:

Long into the 18th century, most New Yorkers relied on these wells and the “Collect” (the anglicized pronunciation of the Kalch-hook) for free drinking water. 

New York, 1763

4.         Urbanization outstripped infrastructure, leading to slums

New York kept growing, but its water supply was finite:

During this period, however, urbanization continued and further industrial and population growth were clearly in store.  Sanitation, an ever-present problem in British cities, was becoming unmanageable. 

A municipal definition : slums are neighborhoods where housing has outrun infrastructure.  And as we saw with Rome (Part 5), the solution to informality that has outgrown efforts to contain it is legalize and tax.

Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist visiting New York in 1748, in a remark Rodney Dangerfield would have loved, observed that the well water was so terrible horses from out of town refused to drink it.  Others noted that well water had become so brackish and hard that soap would not dissolve.  The Collect, once the best source of drinking water on Manhattan, had become polluted from the tanneries and slaughterhouses on its banks.  It was described by a writer of the day as a “very sink and common sewer.” 

As New York kept growing, capitalism moved, and as it always does, it started with those most able to pay:

To those with an entrepreneurial spirit, the poor maintenance of the public wells and the increasingly disgusting state of the Collect posed not a problem but a business opportunity.  People with means began to purchase water from springs outside of town and deeper wells. 

The water here’s much cleaner than in the big city

Just as in Rome, a two-tiered system rapidly emerged.  Municipal water was available free, and if you doubted its quality, you could buy your own pure stock.

Water sold from these sources became known as “Tea Water” and was either fetched by slaves or bought from “Tea Water Men” who purchased water directly from the pump owners and then carted it throughout the city for sale in buckets and barrels.  By the middle of the 18th century, presaging the rise of branded bottled water two hundred years later, sale of Tea Water had become the best source of good drinking water in New York and different pumps were favored over others.  Indeed, a cottage industry developed around a pump operated by the Hardenbrooks family, popularly known as the “Tea Water Pump,” which apparently was the Perrier of its time.  Not everyone could afford to purchase Tea Water, of course, and the public wells remained in use. 

The limitations of public wells and the Collect to provide clean water, growing dependence on Tea Water sales, and general concern over the availability of water to fight fires made clear the need for a serious re-thinking of New York’s water supply.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 7.]

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As we’ve seen so far in this extended series on the economics of water, since housing is what makes cities, for cities to scale upward, they have to bring infrastructure to their slums.  The Roman emperors, who needed larger capital to administer a larger empire, invested heavily in municipal infrastructure to supply Rome with water for drinking, washing, and bathing.  As discussed in Duke law professor Jim Salzman’s article Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water, the shift to municipal infrastructure came when Rome moved from a republic to an empire, which enabled the state to undertake the major capital expenditures involved.

5.         As in the Basic Model, water infrastructure’s capital cost was non-recoverable

The emperors paid for aqueducts out of general revenues, not user fees. 

Aqueduct construction was obviously a major public works project, funded primarily by the emperor and private donations. 

This is the Basic Model of infrastructure finance.

Thereafter, the run costs were paid by users:

The funds raised by the vectigal were used to cover the costs of system maintenance.  The net effect of this water financing scheme gave Roman drinking water a dual nature. 

The vectigal, we saw above, was the premium or surcharge assessed to rich users who had running water in their homes.  Rome thus used a variant of the Basic Model, where shortfalls in the maintenance fees paid by ordinary customers were covered by premium fees charged to rich households.

Public Roman toilet Ostia, 40 BC

Public children’s toilet, Mumbai, 2007

6.         Public municipal water was subsidized

Having spent the vast sums to create the infrastructure, the emperors were then able to offer a citizenship subsidy – free public water.

To the average Roman resident, however, drinking water in the city was available by right, as free for the taking as water from the Tiber.  Each source relied on different rationing strategies for a scarce commodity – use of lacus water was limited by the physical effort of carrying water from the basin to the home, use of water in the home was limited by the cost of paying the vectigal. 

Bludgeoning the obvious, I have to note that because water is both heavy and formless, there is a natural limit on how much one can take away for free.

Lacus water was, in modern parlance, a completely subsidized municipal service.  The lacus were used by citizens for gathering water for domestic use.  Importantly for our purposes, the water in the lacus was free for the taking.  Most residents of Rome collected their water in this way and the lacus provided communal meeting places, much as wells continue to do in many rural societies.  Excavations in Pompeii have uncovered their spacing of about 150 feet from one another throughout the city. 

Dense urban living, and a lacus every 50 yards

7.         As in the Basic-Plus model, premium customers got personal water

Lacus municipal water, though free, was limited de facto, and the rich wanted better service – which they paid for.

Not everyone chose to collect their water from public sources, however, and Roman water finances depended on this demand for private water.

To the wealthy Roman, water in the house (whether for drinking, an ornamental fountain, or domestic uses) effectively was a priced good. 

Indeed, it is estimated that 40% of all the water delivered within Rome went to private buildings, and not all of this was for baths. 

Once the expensive trunk infrastructure had been built, the city could make a profit by running site infrastructure into individual homes.

A special water tax, known as a vectigal, was charged for people who had pipes running from the main system to their houses or baths. 

Like the English window tax or the Colonial roof tax, the assessors taxed the indirect indicator of consumption, not the hard-to-measure consumption itself.

Because the aqueduct was free-flowing and the distribution system worked by gravity, the water was always running.  Thus the tax was assessed by the size of the supply pipe nozzle rather than the amount consumed. 

You see a drain, I see a tax

With the premium for service came a better quality product:

Almost half of the Marcia aqueduct’s water, prized for its drinking quality, went to private uses and roughly a quarter went to the city’s public basins, known as lacus. 

You may laugh at the Romans distinguishing their water by quality, but how many of us drink bottled water even though what comes out of the tap is both virtually free and virtually pure?

How much more is it worth?

8.         The Romans had a ‘free-rider’ problem as well

Any group-benefit asset is vulnerable to what economists have named the free-rider problem – that some people gain the benefit without paying for it.

Piped delivery of water to a private residence was a status symbol, and a common luxury of senators.  It was clearly of considerable value, as well, because a major black market arose in what Frontinus called “puncturing” – attaching secret pipes to main lines in order to draw water illicitly into private residences. 

When I was in Ahemdabad looking at Mahila Housing’s small-scale neighborhood street improvements, among the benefits they cited was precisely this same phenomenon – households running illegal pipes or electrical wires alongside the legal ones.

You don’t mind me borrowing your infrastructure, do you, trunk?

Once the infrastructure is built, the marginal cost to add another consumer (legal or illegal) is quite small, so piggybacking on other people’s infrastructure is perfectly sensible, especially when the penalty for doing so is likely to be not much worse than one’s current situation – one of the many reasons why slums are economically rational. 

Home-grown wiring in Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya

Indeed, those who live in a slum may come to see it as their collective social fiddle against the rich formal outside world, making the resulting utility theft rampant.

This became such a problem that a section of the Roman law code was dedicated specifically to this type of offense, made punishable by a 100,000 sesterces fine.

The ultimate solution is legalize and tax.  In other words, when an informal settlement or spontaneous community has become sufficiently integrated into the larger city that it’s leeching away free utilities, then the locality which may have ignored it up to now must bring it into the formal community, in economic self-defense.  If I’m right about this, slums turn into normal communities through a process of post hoc formalization when their scale, longevity, and civility have collectively legitimized them politically. 

This may be the missing link in De Soto’s theories of formalizing property.

It’s a big concept – beyond the scope of this extended essay.  We’ll save it for another day.

9.         Water was seen as a service of the state to its citizens

Whether ego-based (plaudits), self-interest-based (workforce housing), or otherwise, once the emperors had got into the habit of building aqueducts, basins, and fountains with other people’s money (the tax-based revenues), they found they quite liked it:

These beautiful fountains and basins provided water and a clear justification of regime change.  The Romans’ right to water was acknowledged, ensured, and enhanced in the name of Caesar. 

Rome’s creation of a municipal water-delivery network is important as the first recorded example of two innovations:

1. Utility infrastructure at a metropolitan rather than household scale.
2. A basic-plus financial and operating model to sustain and improve service over time. 

The Roman story, then, provides within the same city fundamentally different visions of drinking water – as a public good provided by right through imperial beneficence, on the one hand, and as a private good for domestic consumption, on the other.  Yet the two depended upon one another, for it was the treatment of drinking water as a priced good that enabled cross-subsidization to ensure its public nature. 

As with many Roman innovations, these principles would be forgotten in the feudal times, but they’ll recur during the Enlightenment.  When they come back, they’ll be back to stay.

You’re going to need some clean water soon

[Continued tomorrow in Part 6.]

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So far in our examination of the economics of water, drawing from Duke law professor Jim Salzman’s article Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water and looking for principles applicable to 21st century urbanization in the world’s rapidly expanding cities and the spontaneous communities that represent their slums, I’ve dealt with pre-urban rules for individual behavior. 

Yet though water may be natural, not earned and not owned, society as a whole has a duty to provide its basic infrastructure, such as wells.

5.         Water’s cleanliness must be protected

Though clean water is a gift of God, humans can pollute it, and even the most primitive societies have (or had) draconian rules to protect its purity:

[Zimbabwe]  There are clear norms to ensure water quality – such as prohibitions against doing laundry or making bricks near wells.

Washing clothes in water brought from the well, Mavoko, Kenya

[India]  Rules for ensuring source water quality are detailed.  The water must be approached barefoot, so that shoes do not pollute the source; containers must be properly cleaned before gathering water; no bathing or washing is allowed near the source; etc.  

Bathing in the Ganges, sacred if not truly clean

The waters at Bath, Georgian over Roman

[Australia]  Defecating or starting a fire near a water hole were vitally serious offenses, giving those responsible for the water the right to punish these transgressions by death (though, in practice, this ultimate sanction was usually negotiated away). 

6.         The aristocracy must be generous

We humans are primates who maintain pecking orders – but those who have more, must provide for those who have less.

[India]  Studies of the Bihar in the northeast region of India reveal some fascinating differences in drinking water management.  Because of the complex social hierarchy, priority of access and management is much more carefully proscribed than in other cultures along social caste lines.  As a researcher has written,

Water is believed to be a medium that transmits pollution when in contact with a person who himself is in a ‘state of pollution.’  Hence, the upper and lower castes are expected to maintain distinctness of water sources as the lower castes, especially the “harijans,” are believed to have the potential of transmitting pollution by sharing sources…  The group of community members who actually have ownership and/or access to a public source depends primarily upon caste and differs in accordance with their social affiliations.

Dalits beginning at Varanasi

As a result, only upper castes may make use of sacred source waters.  The rule of sharing, however, is widely observed and those in need must be given access to water. 

This social differentiation also plays out in water management.  Upper castes are responsible for maintaining the water sources and assign manual labor to the lower castes. 

The rich have a duty to create the group resource.  That is, the rich pay the non-recoverable hard cost.  This early form of charitable contribution is a societally mandated form of the Basic Model of infrastructure finance.

Substitute ‘rich’ or ‘aristocracy’ for ‘government’ and you have the pre-urban ethos in a nutshell.

7.         Infrastructure belongs to the community, not the individual

Akin to the Basic Model, even though the resource itself is divine – not earned, not made, not ours – we who have created the operating model to protect it have dibs on it:

Studies of communal lands in Zimbabwe have found remarkably persistent norms of drinking water management into the present.  While wells and boreholes are often built today for private purposes, they are made available for communal drinking.

[Zimbabwe] Moreover, people must ask permission from the owner prior to using the well.  If they gather too much water, use it for a different purpose than requested, or are unhygienic near the well, then their access rights are limited.  As one person described, “You go to someone you are in good books with.” 

Jewish water carriers, Minsk

8.         Water hoarding or ownership is sinful – and will be met with retaliation

Beneath the surface of all this polite society are real threats: the group resource may be destroyed by any disaffected individual.

One little bottle of poison can ruin a well

As the most comprehensive study of drinking water for the [Zimbabwe] region has concluded, “Cutting across all the different tenurial systems is the notion that no one should be denied access to safe drinking water.”  Interestingly, the impetus for sharing is sanction-based rather than religious.  Field researchers report a general fear that denying water to someone could lead the drinking well to be poisoned – either literally through adding a poison or spiritually through witchcraft. 

Poisoning the well at Calvary

Great rule for a pre-technological, invariant resource.

The net result is that drinking water remains a non-economic good, with no requirement of payment or gifts for access. 

Outright bans, however, are rare for fear of retribution.  One well owner who denied access to his water found a dead dog floating in the well two days after locking the gates. 

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) existed long before John Foster Dulles rediscovered it.

They didn’t say I was MAD back then

In the pre-urban modus vivendi, water was an element, a miracle and a gift.  It was not a commodity, not an asset, not a product, not an output.  Lack of water constrained humanity’s growth, and the growth of humanity’s civilization and culture. 

Clearly, then, access to water in ancient and indigenous cultures was not premised on economic relations.  So when did the transition to commodification of water start to occur?  There is no better place to look than ancient Rome.

Who paid for that thing, anyhow?

[Continued in a few days in Part 4.]

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