The Future of Public Utility Investments

Abstract

The expansion of public utilities and the enormous increase in public utility investments during the past twenty-five years have been among the most remarkable economic developments of a remarkable period in the nation's history. Street railways, electric light and power plants and telephone systems have multiplied in number and increased in size out of all proportion even to the rapid increase of urban population during this period. The development of gas plants has been more steady, but water works, representing for the major part municipal investments, have necessarily developed with great rapidity, since the growth of cities, and especially their crowding together in the more densely populated sections of the country, increases both the relative difficulty and the relative expense of securing adequate water supplies. In attempting to forecast the developments of the next ten, twenty or thirty years, we are met by many uncertainties. Assumptions must be made. The easiest ones to make are that the increase of the total population and the relative increase of the urban population will continue in the future to go along as they have in the immediate past and that the development of public regulatory policies will hold the even tenor of its way, regardless of war's alarms and the expected truculencies of the new breed of powder-and-shell millionaires created by the war. These are rather violent assumptions, but for the purpose of this discussion I shall make them, with the hope that any conclusions reached may be subject to easy modification by other people who think themselves in a position to make different and wiser hypoth-