Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad measurement, part 4

My criticism of average bill ÷ Median Household Income (MHI) as a measure of household-level water affordability isn’t especially new. Lots of other people have pointed out the problems with this conventional methodology, and I’ve been presenting and publishing these arguments for more than twelve(!) years. But golden numbers are stubborn, and bad habits are hard to break—even when people know better.

The remarkable persistence of a bad idea

Over the years I’ve presented to hundreds of utility professionals and spoken personally with scores of managers, analysts, and rate consultants about the pathologies of %MHI and the virtues of alternative approaches. The reception is universally warm and agreeable, as most water professionals genuinely care about affordability and immediately recognize the fundamental flaws of the conventional approach.

And yet.

Alas, there’s an and yet.

Even well-informed specialists continue to use and promote the tried-and-false conventional methodology. Researchers who recognize that average-bill-as-%MHI is deeply flawed employ it anyway because it’s easy and widely recognized (for example). Managers who know that %MHI is a misleading statistic continue to put it in front of their elected officials because it’s familiar and they feel that they have to use this metric because everyone else does, and because they believe it’s an EPA standard (it isn’t). Advocates, analysts, and rate consultants who I like and respect persist with the conventional approach in their studies, even when they know these metrics are fundamentally flawed (many have told me as much!).

Examples abound. The Alliance for Water Efficiency has a nice tool that’s designed to help water utilities model the financial impacts of various rate structures. Sensibly enough, their model includes an assessment of affordability. Unfortunately, it uses the familiar flawed metric:

UNC’s Environmental Finance Center continues to feature average-bill-as-%MHI as the sole affordability indicator on its rates dashboards. Folks at EFC know about the problems with this metric (they blogged about it here), but continue to display it prominently nonetheless.

Easy metrics die hard, it seems.

Breaking habits

Water and sewer ratemaking is a niche specialty (to put it mildly). That’s good news, because if the community of specialists who analyze and design rates for a living get affordability metrics right, there’s a good chance that the utilities they serve will get affordability right, too.

I’ve developed better ways to measure affordability; others are working on this issue, too. At this stage there’s no consensus over the best metrics (naturally, I think mine are great). But abandoning the flawed measurement convention is an important first step.