4 - Hyperopia and Performative Trust

Summary

Distrust in government is contagious. Awareness of drinking water problems can lead the public to distrust their own local water supply, even when people do not personally experience basic service failure. For examlple, lead-testing requests increased dramatically in Providence, Rhode Island, following the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. This chapter examines the ways that water quality problems in one water utility affect customer behavior in other communities. Using an SLX spatial econometric modeling strategy, we show that communities’ demand for commercial water increases in response to other communities’ tap water problems when the communities are demographically and/or socioeconomically alike. Notably, these “spillover” effects are strongest for communities that are socially similar: The physical distance between communities does not affect demand for commercial drinking water in the same way. These findings indicate that problems with tap water anywhere have the potential to cause distrust of tap water everywhere.