Incentives matter, even in Utah
Not everything is about culture.
There’s an understandable impulse people have to explain nearly every imaginable happening in Utah by invoking Mormon culture.
Whether it’s personal bankruptcy,
Plastic surgery,
Even irrigation.
This is such a tired theme in Utah punditry that I was initially excited to see Tanner Greer chiming in to demolish one of these bizarre takes. But well… he mostly just took the culture baton and ran with it in a different direction.
I guess this falls to me.
I. People respond to incentives
Economists can’t stop talking about them, but the simple power of rewards and punishments still might be the most underrated explanation for human behavior.
To illustrate, just look at what my sister sent me a month after our hometown library forgave all overdue balances and announced they would permanently stop charging late fees—
It turns out people are a lot more keen on returning books when there’s a penalty attached to not doing it. Might this basic principle apply to Utahns watering their lawns, I wonder?
II. Utahns are People
I didn’t have to look very far to find evidence for the power of incentives in this context. It’s all right there, buried in the second half of the Guardian article.
A few key excerpts:
1.
According to data from the Utah Rivers Council, residents in Utah cities pay half of what residents of Las Vegas or Denver do for 25,000 gallons of water. And people living in Seattle, San Diego or Tucson pay four times what Utahns spend for that amount of water.
2.
The pricing structure also seems to encourage Utahns, regardless of income, to use a lot of water – 178 gallons a person a day, nearly double the national average. And it gives tax exempt entities such as the Mormon church a huge price break.
3.
Utah grew rapidly after the second world war, and farmland was converted to sprawling suburbs. The population of Salt Lake City boomed, as did the other communities along the Wasatch Front, an 80-mile strip at the base of the mountains stretching from Ogden on the north to Provo on the south. Canals that were originally built to support agriculture were adapted to residential use. This widespread “secondary water” canal system that is unique to Utah allows untreated water to be piped into communities expressly for the purpose of irrigating lawns. Users now pay a flat annual fee of $250 on average for an unlimited and unregulated supply of water. (emphasis added)
4.
Over the last two decades, as megadrought took hold in the south-west, arid states such as California, Nevada and Arizona, have been implementing increasingly aggressive conservation measures. Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles budget millions of dollars to pay residents to pull out their lawns while water cops patrol neighborhood streets to make sure everyone is following the rules. But until last summer, few conservation measures were implemented in Utah. (emphasis added)
With residents of the second driest state in the nation paying $250 for unlimited water while the other deserts shell out for citizens to rip out their yards, is it any wonder why a “culture” of green grass in the summer took root?
III. Fin
As compelling as it feels to explain what’s going on in the world using rough stereotypes, sometimes these things just boil down to boring, universal truths like “people buy more of something when it’s on sale”.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go water my lawn.
People love blaming lawns because it’s visible, but the numbers don’t support that being the main issue.
Roughly 80% of Utah’s water use goes to agriculture, not residential use. And a huge portion of that agricultural water is used to grow alfalfa and hay, which are extremely water-intensive crops. A lot of that production is used for cattle feed and even exported out of state or overseas. So we’re basically using Utah’s limited water to grow feed that often doesn’t even stay in Utah.
Meanwhile, all residential use combined (lawns, showers, toilets, etc.) is only around 10–15% of total water use. Even if every Mormon in Utah ripped out their lawn tomorrow, it wouldn’t come close to solving the state’s water problem.
If we actually want to talk about meaningful conservation, the real conversation has to include agricultural water policy and what crops we’re choosing to grow in a desert climate. Lawns are an easy cultural scapegoat, but they’re not where most of the water is going.
LDS economics student here, so I feel unusually targeted by the content of this article. As always with this topic, my mind turns to McKay Coppins’ brilliant “The Most American Religion”, in the Atlantic. As he points out, there is no other subgroup in the country that is subjected to, and actively tolerates, this level of gawking exoticism – what an ethnic studies department might call “otherism.”
There is this curious blind spot that seems to exist within the analytical processes of ordinarily keen, intelligent, and methodologically consistent pundits/writers; whenever you substitute in the Mormons for some alternative subgroup, any analysis must immediately be founded upon their doctrinal beliefs instead of any acknowledgement that they are typically rational, utility-maximizing people like most any other subgroup in America.
In fact, as Coppins argues in the aforementioned article (I’ll link it below), the belief structure of LDS adherents is often precisely the wrong analytical path to take, given that our historical friction with mainstream American society has birthed a slightly paranoid commitment to fitting in and not rocking the boat. Hence the LDS church blandly swallowing modern cultural expressions of mockery such as Under the Banner of Heaven, Big Love, or the Book of Mormon musical.