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Elinor Ostrom and the well-governed commons
Elinor Ostrom may arguable be considered the mother of field work in development economics. She has worked closely investigating water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana, and irrigation systems in Nepal. In each of these cases her work has explored how between the atomized individual and the heavy-hand of government there is a range of voluntary, collective associations that over time can evolve efficient and equitable rules for the use of common resources.
With her husband, political scientist Vincent Ostrom, she established the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in 1973 at Indiana University, an extraordinarily productive and evolving association of students and professors which has produced a wealth of theory, empirical studies and experiments in political science and especially collective action. The Ostrom's work bridges political science and economics. Both are well known at GMU since both have been past presidents of the Public Choice society and both have been influenced by the Buchanan-Tullock program. You can also see elements of Hayekian thought about the importance of local knowledge in the work of both Ostroms (here is a good interview). My colleague, Peter Boettke has just published a book on the Ostrom's and the Bloomington School.
Elinor Ostrom's work culminated in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action which uses case studies to argue that around the world private associations have often, but not always, managed to avoid the tragedy of the commons and develop efficient uses of resources. (Ostrom summarizes some of her findings from this research here). Using game theory she provided theoretical underpinnings for these findings and using experimental methods she put these theories to the test in the lab.
For Ostrom it's not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons. Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement. A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate. In Hayekian terms legislation is not the same as law. Ostrom's work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on October 12, 2009 at 08:10 AM in Current Affairs, Economics, Political Science | Permalink
Comments
Alex, you are the first person I've read to mention, and indeed stress (justifiably so), Ostrom's contributions to development economics! I would summarize (if one can do so) her work as an acknowledgment, and promotion, of the role of institutional diversity in economic development.
Posted by: CuriousEconomist at Oct 12, 2009 8:38:20 AM
I meant "the first person I've read since the announcement this morning."
Posted by: CuriousEconomist at Oct 12, 2009 8:40:39 AM
The Nobel is for Economic Sciences but Mrs Ostrom is professor in Political Science with:
B.A. (with honors), Political Science, UCLA, 1954
M.A., Political Science, UCLA, 1962
Ph.D., Political Science, UCLA, 1965
Are economists happy?
Posted by: M.G. in Progress at Oct 12, 2009 9:00:04 AM
She defines herself as a "political economist". And, it's better anyway than having someone with a Ph.D in math like Nash, don't you think?
Posted by: CuriousEconomist at Oct 12, 2009 9:05:49 AM
I know, it's a matter of definition and whether the Nobel Prize is in Economics or is an award for outstanding contributions in the field of economics. She is the first female although there were few female candidates.
Posted by: M.G. in Progress at Oct 12, 2009 9:20:09 AM
Lin's not the first political scientist to win the Prize. Herbert Simon won it a long time ago. I don't think any living economist doubts his contributions. Of course, to label either Lin or Simon as a political scientist is simply to participate in a form of academic pigeon-holing that they both repudiated. They are models (to borrow Simon's favorite word) of interdiscipinarity.
Posted by: dan cole at Oct 12, 2009 9:20:21 AM
It's not the first time that a non-economist has won. Technically, I don't even think Ronald Coase had a PhD in economics but I may be wrong on that (wikipedia says he got a "higher doctorate"). Of course, there's Kahneman who was a psychologist, which is far more left of field. But prospect theory is almost established as the canonical model in decision theory (not quite, as vnm is still that base model, but close).
Posted by: anonymous at Oct 12, 2009 9:27:56 AM
Or is this the dawning of a 'new imperialism'- how long have I heard political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists complain about the imperialism of economics? My response has been that economists shook up their sister disciplines where they most needed to be shook up, and we have been running to catch up for a while now... Time for a baton change? (it's ok, just adding a little drama...)
Posted by: michael heller at Oct 12, 2009 9:33:57 AM
"A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate."
This seems like a fascinating point -- has she (or anyone else) done more on this on a wider scale? Like we all know that adherence to drug laws are driven widely by whether or not the person believes they are legitimate. An even better example might be copyright protection. How do we expect the subsequent effects of policy to be changed based on how legitimate people believe it to be? And more specifically, the people it directly affects. How do we track the results of laws that may be just mandating that people do something they wanted to do anyway?
Posted by: Brian Moore at Oct 12, 2009 9:50:41 AM
anonymous: a “higher doctorate” from an English university is ordinarily granted for work regarded as significantly more advanced than that required for a PhD. Today, such a doctorate is almost always awarded for published work, though at some point in the twentieth century a person could obtain one by writing a thesis (presumably intended for publication). In almost all cases, a higher doctorate from a given university is available only to someone who previously earned another degree from the same university (usually after a specified amount of time has elpased)
It was quite common on Coase's era, and after, for an English academic in the arts or the social sciences to receive a university appointment based solely on her or his undergraduate performance (a UK undergrad. degree is considerably more intensive than its US equivalent) and then, if her or his subsequent performance merited it, to apply for and obtain a “superior” or “higher” doctorate, while ignoring the PhD option entirely; it's only been relatively recently that a competitive employment market has made it almost unavoidable for candidates for positions even in these areas to hold PhDs when applying.
Everyone: it seems as if a scholar's contribution to our understanding of a topic or topics related to a given field ought to be what matters when she or he is being considered for a prize in that field, not whether she or he happens to hold formal academic qualifications in the relevant area. Ostrom's done great stuff; let's celebrate.
Posted by: Gary Chartier at Oct 12, 2009 10:10:19 AM
Nice job, Alex. She was influential in early public choice movement.
Posted by: bob tollison at Oct 12, 2009 10:26:45 AM
On whether this is economics: I don't think we care, as long as it's good work. Which this seems to be. I'm embarrassed I didn't know about it till now.
Posted by: Dave Backus at Oct 12, 2009 10:27:10 AM
I wonder how her findings also support the new left's idea of participatory democracy, who tends to be small scale in their ideals, in contrast to the current large corporation dominated economy.
Posted by: passerby at Oct 12, 2009 10:40:05 AM
"a UK undergrad. degree is considerably more intensive than its US equivalent" - as someone with intimate experience in both, I can assure you that this depends on which UK and which US school you are referring.
Posted by: suffix at Oct 12, 2009 10:41:39 AM
Thanks for the informative post, Alex. Both awards reflect the importance of emergent institutions, and both support non-coercive governance solutions. Bravo.
Posted by: Ed Lopez at Oct 12, 2009 10:43:49 AM
Coase earned the BSc in Commerce from the London School of Economics; he had no formal economics training--something that he has said was a help, rather than a hindrance, as it gave him a measure of freedom in thinking about how to go about examining interesting problems. (His graduate degree came many years later, based upon a body of published work rather than graduate study.) Interestingly, both Williamson and Ostrom won their prizes in part based on work in areas (the firm, property rights ...) probed by Coase in the articles based on which he received the Prize.
There is a long tradition of pioneering contributions in economics coming from folks educated outside of the discipline. Friedman's undergrad work in statistics was central to his path-breaking work in economics. Tullock, whose work in public choice probably merits a Nobel, has a JD, not an economics Ph.D. Similarly for Dick Posner, who should win the Prize at some point for his work in the economic analysis of law (a very different "law and economics" from that done by Coase).
Posted by: Steve Medema at Oct 12, 2009 11:03:01 AM
And, it's better anyway than having someone with a Ph.D in math like Nash, don't you think?
The same sort of argument applies to both. There's not a prize in Mathematics, either, and Nash's work was certainly important-- you can't argue that his work on game theory was ridiculous technical out-there macro modeling or useless mathematics.
The Chemistry and Medicine prizes get used for Biologists a lot too, since there is no Biology prize. Sometimes chemists get annoyed at this too.
Posted by: John Thacker at Oct 12, 2009 11:08:35 AM
Good to news to hear. We out here in the Localities think about these things as well as the Academics. It sounds as if the work that got the award is a variant of my notion that Economics fails to the degree it deludes in thought of being a Science and succeeds to the degree that it acknowledges it is a social "science" or area of study that is hard to separate from History, Government, Sociology, and mostly from Philosophy. In Academia there is an organizational need to divide these areas of study, but it is a detrimental illusion to think that in the Real World there are those boundaries. The lack of good philosophy has created an economic school that is about math rather than people, and the current chaos in the US economy is a direct result of that.
Looks like the prize givers, whoever they are, this year are as much about pushing a direction of action as they are appreciation of ones long days of working in the vineyard.
Posted by: Roy at Oct 12, 2009 11:12:59 AM
"a UK undergrad. degree is considerably more intensive than its US equivalent" -- Gary Chartier
1) Suffix is right: it depends on the UK and US universities. I'm a graduate of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard (Ph.D. from the latter in both economics and political science) --- all three excellent universities. The undergrad work at Stanford was, if anything, more demanding than what I saw at Oxford. What "more intensive" could be re-written to mean accurately is this: British undergrad education, like its equivalents on the European Continent, is specialized from the word go.
Whether that's desirable is another matter --- such specialization at an early age.
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2) Consider a good English friend of mine at Oxford who was accepted to do law-studies at the age of 18.
He hated the discipline, wasn't interested in it, but could not switch to another discipline. He flunked his three-year exams the first time, passed the next year, and became a writer for the theater and eventually, moving to the US, has become one of New York's most prominent theatrical critics.
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3) Another English friend of mine, also a specialist in law studies --- who was also the president of the Oxford Union debating society --- passed the bar for a barrister career in London.
After two years, he was bored stiff. He entered Harvard Law School, where --- the first time he was called on my a professor to stand up and answer a question about the cases they were studying --- he, a very experienced debater, was flummoxed by the demanding question and reprimanded in class by the professor.
Afterwards, he applied himself with diligence; opted for the doctoral program at the law school; studied with some social scientists; and carried out path-breaking work on the effects of anti-discrimination laws in the Boston area. Soon afterwards, he was given a chair in urban studies at the University of London --- and has done outstanding work ever since.
...
4) In my own political science classes at UC Santa Barbara, I've had several British students over the decades. They were bright and did well, but all of them whom I met with over coffee said they were surprised by how hard the classes were in our department.
..
5) I've also had experience as a student and professor in France, Germany, and Switzerland. My impression is that the UK universities are rightly regarded as of higher quality --- not least in facilities, contacts with teachers, and a sense of personal well-being as a student --- compared to the much larger, far more impersonal, much less well-endowed with library and other resources --- than those on the Continent, with Swiss universities doing better on these scores than the built-in alienating campus-life (if that's the right word) that exists in the huge, impersonal universities in France and Germany.
Whether that's the case in the smaller West European countries of Scandinavia and Holland is another matter, about which I've no personal experience. It wouldn't surprise me, though, if they did better than their French and German (or Italian and Spanish) equivalents on all the counts such mentioned.
...
Michael Gordon, AKA the buggy professor
Posted by: the buggy professor at Oct 12, 2009 11:49:07 AM
Hayek did not have a degree in econ -- he had one in law and another in political science.
Posted by: philosophking at Oct 12, 2009 12:16:16 PM
This award reflects influences of both Herbert Simon and Ronald
Coase. Simon was actually Williamson's professor at Carnegie-Mellon.
Even though he got the economics Nobel, Simon did not like economics
and late in his career was in four departments at Carnegie-Mellon,
none of them economics (management, psychology, computer science, and
cognitive science).
In addition to Simon and Coase, Ostrom also reflects influence of
two other Nobelists, one with a strong Mason connection. One is
Nash, whom some are ridiculuing here. She has used game theory in
studying when and how people are able to cooperate to manage a common
property resource. She also has used experimental methods to study
these problems, thus drawing on the influence of Nobelist, Vernon Smith,
the "father of experimental economics," and still officially on the
books at GMU, even though he is now more fully at Chapman.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Oct 12, 2009 12:18:54 PM
Is she the first woman to win the Nobel Prize?
Joan Robinson did not get it.
Posted by: Eugene Zhang at Oct 12, 2009 12:35:07 PM
Nobody ridiculed Nash...
Posted by: CuriousEconomist at Oct 12, 2009 12:39:30 PM
Elinor's work sounds great, an inspiring human antidote to the 'selfish' economic/political/social explanations I hear through the mainstream media.
It's good to see it widely publicised; even if that media seem to concentrate more on the novelty of the prize than the importance of the work.
Posted by: silverdarling at Oct 12, 2009 12:50:51 PM
It was a very poor choice. She is a development economics, but development is not happening anywhere. She studied voluntary self-governing irrigation projects in the Third World, projects that have no centralized management nor private ownership, yet there no successful such projects in the real world. She caters to the leftist wishful thinking (or dreaming) NGO busybodies touring Africa, and the do-good wealthy Norwegian folks.
Posted by: j at Oct 12, 2009 1:12:47 PM
