What is interesting is that many who would talk about pricing parking, roads, etc. don’t extend it to water. As I have explained in some earlier post, this is usually because of valid fears (poor will have to pay for water). There is also their inability, purposely or not, to extend the parking/road pricing logic to water. There is support for parking and road pricing because of the assumption that this will force the rich to pay for what they use. Well then why not make the rich pay for the water they use, whether the rich is a farmer or not?

Just like road pricing is complex and will take a lot of thinking to implement, so will water pricing. Does the poor rickshaw walla have to pay for using the road? What about the cyclists? Why not ? How will you check and implement this?

It would be far easier, I think, to price water and hence help the environment and the economy (read people in both cases!) For example, any farmer deemed poor could be given electricity credits paid for by taxpayers. The farmer still pays for the electricity he uses, but the money come out of the taxpayers’ pockets. For drinking water, I have discussed this in one or more earlier posts.

One critical issue is delinking the operating and capital cost/revenue of the company (public or private) providing the service from the subsidy. Otherwise it starts of a vicious cycle – company looses money, hence cannot upgrade its facilities, bad service, lose due to theft and leaks, company looses more money. ……

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Turns out Mr Nelson Mandela gave a copy of the following speech to François Pienaar, captain of the South African rugby team, before the start of the 1995 Rugby World Cup^[1], in which the South African side eventually defeated the heavily favoured All Blacks. In the film based on those events, the poem Invictus is used instead.

Full text of Citizenship in a Republic – The Man in the Arena

The following lines a really powerful even though the rest of the speech is a bit tedious. We all encounter, in all walks of life, people who face life with a a sneer.

Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows…….

I was very intrigued by the note below on Jane Jacob, is her Hayekian or not. Most interesting point for me was what this would do for the poorest of poor of the world. Usually critics jump on these ideas and label them elitist – “Rich are trying to secede”.

Also check out the TED presentation. Arable land versus urban space ( Romer illustrates using light points on night map of the earth) is really cool.

Related posts:

1. Wheelchair test (3.023)
2. Not just Delhi, Madam Sheilaji! (2.957)
3. Let a hundred Hong Kong bloom (2.472)
4. Hope is the antidote to Naxalism (2.251)

For how this speech became what it is, how King developed the theme, check out

Parting the Water America in the King Years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for history. This is first of the trilogy.  As you would expect from any movement, there were lot of intrigues, pettiness, jealousy, etc. One can even see King as a regular guy, afraid of the future and what will happen to him and his family. But the moral of the story is how he and others rose above it all and lead the way.

My favorite part is the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. What I found most interesting, and you never hear this angle, is how the license-permit raj added to the problem. More on this later.

Florida’s Unheralded School Revolution

Very significant is

The bill passed both houses overwhelmingly, including support from 42% of Democrats and 52% of the legislative black caucus. (Nearly every Republican voted yes.) That is a remarkable turnabout for a program that received one Democratic vote when it was created in 2001. Why the shift?

For too long black politicians in the US ignored the needs of their community due to pressure from national teachers’ unions. I suppose Public Choice Theory applies at all levels and in all communities.

“Ideally utilities should not make any distinction between rich and poor,” said Prof. Asit Biswas, president of the Third World Centre for Water Management. “The moment you subsidise [someone's bill] people don’t use water prudently.”

The quote brings out a very key point. But this could be misconstrued as “throw all the poor out to die of thirst”. Utilities should must be paid market rate, so that they have the resources to upgrade facilities and remedy the problems mentioned in the article. Poor can be subsidised directly so that they can afford to pay market price. This not only helps them purchase the resources they need, they will also have the incentive to conserve. Basically delink the subsidy of poor from the operations of the utilities. Else utilities suffer, in turn don’t have resources, in turn can’t upkeep infrastructure and hence not provide services, in turn ….. The poor and the environment end up getting hammered from all sides.

As for the rich, let us/them eat cake (pay market price for what we/they consume).