Courses

David Zetland

Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow

University of California Berkley

David Zetland is an assistant professor at Leiden University College, where he teaches various classes on economics. He received his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis in 2008 (Dissertation: Conflict and Cooperation inside a Public Corporation: a Case Study of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California). He was a S.v. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at UC Berkeley (2008-2010), a Senior Water Economist at Wageningen University (2011-2013), an Instructor at Simon Fraser University (Spring 2014), and a Visiting Fellow at KAPSARC in Riyadh (May 2014). He blogs on water, economics and politics at aguanomics.com, has two books (The End of Abundance: economic solutions to water scarcity and Living with Water Scarcity), gives many talks to public, professional and academic audiences, and writes for popular and academic outlets.

Blog Posts

Blame outdated rights for California's water woes.

April 22, 2017
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Environmentalism

Most water policies reflect some balance of rights and duties. Farmers have right to use water but a duty to leave remaining waters intact for their neighbors. Urban dwellers have the right to receive drinking and wastewater services but a duty to pay for them. In his 1960 article, "The problem of social cost," Ronald Coase discussed how the award of rights to one side of a polluter-pollutee relationship is a necessary first step towards finding the efficient level of pollution. His idea, sometimes called the "Coase Theorem," was that a property right (to pollute or be free of pollution) could