David Zetland, economist extraordinaire, gave this TEDx presentation at Wageningen University in June 2012.
The blurb from the WWW site:
David Zetland is a senior water economist in the Department of Environmental Economics and Natural Resources at Wageningen University in the Netherlands where he is working on an EU-funded project, "Evaluating Economic Policy Instruments for Sustainable Water Management in Europe." He blogs on water, economics and politics ataguanomics.com and is the author of The End of Abundance: Economic Solutions to Water Scarcity (2011). He is passionate about making it easier for people to accomplish their goals, improving the ways we interact with each other, and enjoying the beauty of the natural and human worlds.
Here is his assessment of the talk:
In the talk ("Pushing a String"), I spoke on the difference between markets/ecosystems in which push/pull competition produces more robust outcomes and water systems where push mechanisms give very little power to consumers, who are faced with the option of accepting the service/choices they are given or giving feedback that's ignored (i.e., pushing on a string). I go on to give fail examples of Las Vegas (sell you cheap water then tell you how to use it), Westlands Water District and the millenium development goal for clean drinking water. I also provide win examples to show how each of these fails could be reversed.
The talk was a challenge for me, not just because my mike fell off, but also because I was using no notes, trying to work a string (not very well, unfortunately), and speaking on this topic for the first time. That said, I think I did a decent job (7/10), and the chocolate was quite good.
Both David and I will be panelists at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs' groundwater event on 25 June 2013:
Download POWI-GroundwaterAgenda-June10
Should be fun.
"If climate change is a monster, water is its teeth." - Unknown
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.