alt Hacker NewsYes, it's an outstanding book, well worth reading:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner, Penguin Books, 1986, 1993.
A recent perspective on this excellent book by Ryan Cooper is also very good. He says that journalists in the 1970s and 80s were infected with Reaganite ideology and made some mistakes. Worth reading:
https://prospect.org/2025/12/12/cadillac-desert-reconsidered...
>Reisner [...] often relies on neoliberal economics
So, correct economics?
>[the] idea that public works projects should each pay for themselves individually is straight out of neoliberal dogma
I mean, not really; it's not an idea unique to neoliberalism. And if it were, that it is characteristic of neoliberalism does not constitute an argument against it.