Is It Safe to Drink the Water? Turning on the Tap, with Dave Keiser and Joseph Shapiro

In this episode, host Margaret Walls speaks to Dave Keiser and Joseph Shapiro about safe drinking water in the United States. Keiser is a professor at the Yale School of the Environment, and Shapiro is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Together with other coauthors, they put out a research paper on clean drinking water: how US residents have access to it, what types of policies help preserve it, and the degree to which it benefits people’s health. Their paper incorporates more than 250 million readings on 1,250 different water pollutants across 48 states over several decades, links those data to maps of public water systems across the country, and connects all this information to health outcomes via Medicare data. The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 authorizes the US Environmental Protection Agency to set limits on contaminants in water supplied by public water systems, and the act provides financial loans to local municipalities for constructing and upgrading water-treatment plants; this law led to major improvements in providing clean drinking water to US residents. Some of the questions Keiser and Shapiro address in this episode: What exactly are the benefits of access to clean water—and do those benefits justify the costs? What level of government is most effective for managing drinking water? Find out more by listening to the episode.

References and recommendations:

“Water Works: Causes and Consequences of Safe Drinking Water in America” by David A. Keiser, Bhashkar Mazumder, David Molitor, and Joseph S. Shapiro; https://www.nber.org/papers/w35288

“National trends in drinking water quality violations” by Maura Allaire, Haowei Wu, and Upmanu Lall; https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719805115

“The Evolution of Water Pollution Control in the United States” by William L. Andreen; https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_articles/10/

“The Lost City of the Monkey God” by Douglas Preston; https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/douglas-preston/the-lost-city-of-the-monkey-god/9781455540020/

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