Professor Manuel Teodoro did not set out to write a book about civic engagement and democracy. He was just curious about some roadside water kiosks.
In “The Profits of Distrust,” Teodoro and his co-authors, Samantha Zuhlke and David Switzer, explore the relationship between civic engagement and the sale of bottled water or from a kiosk. The researchers point to the growing body of research that finds that violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act are more common in communities with a larger Hispanic and Black populations. They explore those inequities and argue that failing tap water systems in the United States erode trust in government. As a result, the people who can least afford it end up buying expensive bottled water, even if what’s coming out of the tap is safe.
Over the past two decades, the size of the bottled water industry in the U.S. has nearly tripled. In 2020, wholesale revenues totaled $20.1 billion. While commercial water companies market their water as a cleaner alternative to tap water, research shows little evidence to support or refute these claims because this industry has less stringent oversight compared to tap water. But high-profile instances of government failure and wrongdoing, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, help them make the case.
Researchers found that people who don’t trust the government have “a higher chance of using bottled water than individuals who trust the state government.” The distrust is rooted in past failures or the exclusion of racial groups.
“We didn’t go in expecting this was going to be about democracy,” Teodoro said. “We thought that this was gonna be a funny little story about a consumer product. But it turned out to be something much bigger and much deeper.”
*Excerpts of this conversation have been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe the term “distrust premium” and how it plays out in communities as it relates to water consumption?
The distrust premium is the extra spending that people do, or the resources that people spend, because they distrust public services. It can come in all kinds of forms. But some of the more obvious ones would be things like private schools and private security or aided communities. But drinking water is maybe the most palpable one. Basically, people who don’t trust the government end up spending more money on commercial alternatives. So folks who are struggling to pay their bills will nonetheless spend $50, $75, $100, $150 a month or more on bottled water.
Often that is people from poor and or racial and ethnic minority communities who end up spending money that frankly, they don’t need to, and sometimes really can’t afford. But they do it because they believe that it’s necessary. I want to be clear, people who buy bottled water because they distrust governments are not stupid. They’re not crazy. They’re not irrational. They’re making very sound decisions based on what they believe and their perceptions of how governance institutions work.
Somebody who believes that the government is incompetent or maybe even malevolent and hostile to their group, then it makes sense not to trust the products in that group. So rebuilding trust in drinking water can go a long way to help with affordability. Tap water costs about a penny a gallon and bottled water costs somewhere between $2 and $3 a gallon. So before we even talk about the environmental impacts, just the affordability impacts of bottled water, are huge. So if we can get folks, especially low-income and non-white folks, to move from bottled water to a high-quality tap water source, they’re gonna save a lot of money. And it’s going to help with our challenges of poverty and economic inequality.
In the chapter “Geographies of Alienation,” you wrote about how the legacy of discrimination in the country has created politically marginalized communities. How does living in a geography of alienation impact whether someone buys bottled water?
I got to give a lot of credit for that chapter to Samantha Zuhlke, who led that section of the book, which I think is one of the most important parts of the project. Geographies of alienation referred to places where past political institutions or public policies alienated specific elements of the population. And I want to emphasize here, the point is deliberately designed political institutions that alienated certain kinds of people. Some obvious examples would be things like redlining, a practice whereby banks and federal agencies set loan standards or mortgage worthiness standards for different kinds of neighborhoods. And one of the criteria that went into those mortgage lending standards was the racial composition of the neighborhood.
So these were systems that made it much more difficult [for] Black residents to own their homes. Well, fast forward 70, 80, 90 years, and we see that the neighborhoods that were redlined are buying more bottled water today, or they have more key drinking water kiosks located in them today. That’s just one small example. But we go through in the chapter and look at multiple examples where specific kinds of populations had political institutions lined up against them in the past. And the legacies of those institutions carry forward in the form of distrust, because people who, let’s say, are poor, or maybe Black, or maybe Hispanic or Latino, they look at the history of their people, their history of people like them and they see that these are political institutions that have failed them, or have been outright hostile toward them.
They noticed that those same institutions are providing or regulating drinking water, and they think to themselves, why should I trust this institution that has in the past failed me and people like me? So that’s where the geography of alienation comes from. It’s that terrible legacy of discrimination in the past that carries through today.
You wrote about the tale of two cities with Flint, Michigan, and Providence, Rhode Island. What did you want to illustrate about government distrust with these case studies?
That turned out to be a fascinating pairing of cases. So Flint and Providence are both older cities, sort of what we would call America’s Rust Belt. They’ve got declining populations, high poverty rates and significant non-white minority populations. They’re similar in a lot of ways and of course, Flint suffered major lead contamination crises in 2014 and 2015. What’s not as well known is that Providence experienced a very similar set of lead contamination problems. In fact, in some ways, the contamination levels in Providence were worse than they were in Flint. You didn’t get any national headlines. People who run the utility have known about lead contamination problems since the 1990s and had been working to fix it.
There wasn’t a cover-up like we saw in Flint, but the point is, it was a challenge. Well, in Providence, for many years, the utility had offered customers free lead testing on their water, at low cost or free so that any customer concerned about lead could test their water. Every year, they got a few people interested, maybe five,10, 12 folks a month were interested in getting their water tested. After the Flint water crisis hit national news, interest in free lead testing skyrocketed. So we look at the data right after the national news media started covering Flint, and the city started testing a lot more people’s water for lead. Well, the lesson we take from that is something we call hyperopia, which is a condition in your eyes, where you see things far away better than you see things that are close. People in Providence saw what happened in Flint and could identify with them.The critical thing is that the populations of these two cities are very similar in their demographic characteristics. Our claim is that the people in Providence looked at the people of Flint, and identified with them, and therefore believe that problems in Flint might indicate problems in their own community, which were there all along, but which they hadn’t noticed before.
At the end of your book, you offer eight recommendations to improve tap water consumption. Why did you end the book that way?
I think there’s a couple of reasons. One is I’m just an optimistic guy. I think my co-authors are optimistic people, too. We think it’s important to end with a positive note. Medical researchers are not paid to declare that diseases are incurable and public policy researchers should take the same approach. Our job isn’t to declare that our governance is broken, and our tap water is terrible, and everyone’s distrustful. Our job is to figure out what the problems are in ways that will help us solve them. So we try to come up with some concrete solutions to help restore trust in tap water and thereby restore trust in governance generally.
The recommendations include: consolidating water systems, regulatory implementation, improving tap water aesthetics, investing in infrastructure, reinvesting in human capital among others.
The post How distrust in government leads to civic engagement appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
