Charles C. Mann Quote
Cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference. French cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania’s cities lose almost a quarter; cities in KwaZulu-Natal, the South African province, lose more than a third. So much of India’s urban water supply is contaminated that the lost productivity from the resultant disease costs fully 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. More than thirty North American cities improperly test for lead in their water, including, famously, Flint, Michigan, where bungling local, state, and federal officials have forced residents to drink bottled water for years.
Cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference. French cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania’s cities lose almost a quarter; cities in KwaZulu-Natal, the South African province, lose more than a third. So much of India’s urban water supply is contaminated that the lost productivity from the resultant disease costs fully 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. More than thirty North American cities improperly test for lead in their water, including, famously, Flint, Michigan, where bungling local, state, and federal officials have forced residents to drink bottled water for years.
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