Americans open a tap and get water much like their parents and grandparents did, but the price of water and sewer for households has more than doubled since the early 1980s, adjusted for inflation. American households in large cities now spend about $1,300 a year on water and sewer charges, even though per-capita use has actually decreased.
The roots of America’s water problems lie in the 1970s. Since the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, federal environmental rules have ratcheted up. Although state and local water systems had spent the previous century implementing massive improvements in water quality, national regulators treated these systems, supervised by local voters, as delinquent and needing prodding to reform.
Water policy parallels nuclear power, similarly forcing operators to reduce risks, no matter how trivial, and increasing costs to the point where nuclear is expensive and seldom used. This is another example of ‘safetyism’, the tacit ideology that the government’s main goal should be to minimize risks rather than balance them against benefits.
The triumph of urban water
The broad-based provision of clean water in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is one of the great successes in the history of civilization. The US, as did many other countries, accomplished this primarily through local government.
For most of history, cities were demographic sinks. More people died in them than were born, so they needed constant replenishment by migrants from the countryside. Urban areas remained deadly even into the early twentieth century. In 1900, infectious disease death rates were 75 percent higher in the largest American cities than in rural areas. Pathogens, especially waterborne ones such as cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery, caused 40 percent of these deaths. Yet just three decades later the largest urban areas had slightly lower death rates from infectious diseases than rural areas did, with infectious diseases now causing only 15 percent of deaths.
By the 1940s, infant mortality had collapsed, long before the massive scaleup of penicillin production during the Second World War. Researchers tried to tease out the different mortality rate impacts of introducing new water technologies, such as filtration and chlorination, by looking at how mortality rates dropped in different cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Different technologies were installed in different cities at different times, but waterborne disease mortality dropped in almost every city very soon after water treatment was installed. The researchers concluded that half the overall mortality, two thirds of the child mortality, and three quarters of the infant mortality reduction in the early twentieth century were down to clean water.