From The Progressive: http://progressive.org/elinor_ostrom_made_history.html
By Amitabh Pal
June 14, 2012
Elinor Ostrom, who passed away on June 12
from pancreatic cancer, made history by becoming the first and only
woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Her research provided acute
insights into how the world really worked. I was fortunate to interview her two years ago at Indiana University (where she taught for decades), just months after she was awarded the Nobel.
“I’ve
been interested in democratic governance at the very base,” she told
me. She focused on “the capabilities of people at the smaller scale:
from schools and parks to fisheries and irrigation systems,” she said.
Ostrom
made her name critiquing a concept in the social sciences called the
“tragedy of the commons.” This concept assumes that common property will
inevitably be overused and degraded in the absence of private
ownership. Not necessarily so, Ostrom said. Through her study of
communally owned property in places ranging from Southern California and
coastal Maine to Nepal and Kenya, she demonstrated that democratically
managed commons could be sustainably used and preserved.
At the same time,
Ostrom was conscious of libertarians co-opting her work by arguing that
it showed the lack of need for any large-scale governance.
“The
important thing about large-scale is the court system,” she said. “For
example, you would not have civil rights for people of black origin in
the United States but for a federal court system and also the courage of
Martin Luther King and others.”
Continue reading at: http://progressive.org/elinor_ostrom_made_history.html
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