Robin Hanson Meme I recently wrote a paper on how the Jordanian monarchy decided who to give water to and who to take water away from. As I near completion, I am realizing that signalling theory from Robin Hanson gives a pretty compelling explanation of my results, probably better than my explanation. I will give a brief summary. So in the 1990s and 2000's poor neighbourhoods of East Amman periodically had water shortages. Whole neighbourhoods would go without pumped water for a month and people would riot. The Government of Jordan (GoJ) does not like riots and were motivated to stop this. Jordan has two relevant water sources they could use to make up the shortfall of 100-150 million cubic meters MCM. The Northern Highlands are close to the capital Amman and have a few profitable farms and a lot of smaller, unprofitable "prestige" farms owned by Jordanians. The southern desert is a good 600 km away and has four large profitable farms. The farms are owned by rich, politically connected Jordanian families and operated almost entirely by Egyptian migrant laborers. The World Bank for twenty years suggested taxing the farms in the Northern Highlands to close the unprofitable ones then redirecting that water from the capital. Since Amman sits on the Northern Highlands the costs of transporting the water are trivial. Instead the Jordanians paid about a billion dollars to build a massive pipeline to the southern farms, then shut them down instead. They don't publish the data I could use to compare how much more expensive the Disi pipeline solution was, but capital costs were about a billion USD and the energy costs are likely double the cost of other sources (of order 1 dollar per cubic meter). The water sectors cost recovery ration dropped by 30% the year they finished the project, financed by public debt until a 2018 fee increase forced by the WB. The Jordanians have justified their decision for two reasons. The first is that closing the farms in the north would req