Regarding the brouhaha over the NBER paper that tested cutting off water to poor households to punish non-payment of water bills, it’s interesting to me that the fact that the utility is public is being used as moral cover.
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This is World Bank-sponsored public sector “capacity building” in LDCs, but of course the World Bank spent decades telling developing countries to privatize everything to make it more efficient, to disempower rent-seeking bureaucrats and unleash capitalism, etc.
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All of that reflected then-cutting-edge neoliberal ideology in the rich world, imposed on the poor. The way the above-quoted paragraph would have been written ca. 1990 would have been “we were helping a public utility adopt a private sector approach.”
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Now the equivalent statement, designed to import an implied morality, is “we were helping a public utility become sustainable.” The Economist As Plumber, in this case, more literally than that slogan was first articulated.
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In other words, the ideology that’s doing economists’ necessary work of establishing virtue has shifted from privatization (Reagan/Thatcher) to technocratic expertise (Obama).
cc @Undercoverhist
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cc @Undercoverhist
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