I’ll be giving an academic — but non-technical — talk at Stanford on Friday at noon [event link].

Title: The Decline of Engineers and Rise of Economists

Abstract: Until the 1960s, water managers in the southwest were more concerned with how to augment and distribute supplies than on how to allocate supplies. In these earlier years, engineers were valued for their abilities to move water from point A to point B in the most efficient manner, and prices were calculated to recover costs. When this abundance ended — for many reasons (legal, environmental, and economic) — and scarcity became the norm, water managers failed to change their practices to reflect new conditions. With demand exceeding supply on many measures and in many places, managers need to adjust their thinking and prices to a new reality, but they are failing to do so. Much of this failure can be traced to their familiarity with engineering and lack of economic understanding. I will show how these patterns underlie the “shortages” we are experiencing today, the failed policies that are being implemented to deal with them, and the man-made disaster that managers cum engineers fail to recognize. Simple solutions are available to those with the courage to look outside their disciplinary norms.