Comments on: The Ostrom Nobel

By: paul

paul — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:50:42 +0000

Chris @ 47:

I think your formulation might be useful, except that the memberships of the groups 1, ii, iii and iv aren’t agreed on by those groups. When the ii folks talk about “free riders”, for example, they’re typically talking about a different set of people from the ones the folks in iii or iv might be talking about.

By: Alan Sloane

Alan Sloane — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:42:00 +0000

Today’s Irish Times has a good general audience editorial on Ostrom and Williamson, finding something in common between them.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1016/1224256786267.html

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:33:43 +0000

Welcome aboard!

By: Margaret Keck

Margaret Keck — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:18:00 +0000

Besides spending a lifetime studying design principles that make institutions work, the Ostroms essentially built a vast, cross-disciplinary field of research and discussion on how institutions work from the ground up. Although CPRs have been a major focus, they haven’t been the only one (Lin Ostrom’s early work on police departments is pretty interesting). The number of highly productive people who have been involved with their Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana at some point or another is very impressive. Take a look at the Digital Library of the Commons associated with the Workshop’s web site. It’s also worth going beyond Governing the Commons and taking a look at her 2005 book Understanding Institutional Diversity. Or at her 1997 Presidential Address at the American Political Science Assn. convention, published in March 1998 APSR. Having been assigned parts of Governing the Commons a couple of weeks ago, my undergraduates had a good time discussing the prize yesterday. And hello to all, having lurked here but never left a comment before.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:16:55 +0000

Fama was in line for the prize, but the committee chickened out. Fuck.

From this we know that there were no real economists on the committee. Just a bunch of humorless bureaucrats who were afraid to make fools of themselves.

By: Matthias Wasser

Matthias Wasser — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:23:41 +0000

As someone who is a huuuuuuuuuuuge “statist,” or whatever it is libertarians call people who aren’t libertarians nowadays, and who likes what he sees in Ostrom – Ostrom and Hayek are definitely very similar. I don’t think you need to have the same politics as someone to have an intellectual affinity with them.

By: belle le triste

belle le triste — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:54:56 +0000

Really ? No, really. Really really really.

By: Peter J. Karthak

Peter J. Karthak — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:13:35 +0000

Where is Nepal in your longwinded article? How could you not mention even once the very country as the source of Ms Ostrom’s findings and revelations. A journalistic vacuum! A great pity!!

Peter J. Karthak
Copy Editor, Republica, Kathmandu, Nepal

By: Greg Ransom

Greg Ransom — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:06:09 +0000

You’re comments on Hayek are an intellectual travesty and and intellectual embarrassment as a pretended account of Hayek’s actual work.

Really.

By: Greg Ransom

Greg Ransom — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:04:34 +0000

You don’t know Hayek. You haven’t read Hayek.

And you are arguing against phantoms.

Really.

By: Guano

Guano — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:00:26 +0000

I’ve always liked Elinor Ostrom’s work. Her rules about collective action are very useful for community development work. The stuff about trust, accountability, monitoring and transparence are fundamental: it is very obvious but it is interesting how many people shy away from it.

I’ve never clearly understood the categories “libertarian” and communitarian”, probably because Ostrom’s work transcends it.

Scaling up: I think that there is some potential for scaling up, and the Ostroms contributions to polycentric governance are interesting. Trust, accountability, monitoring and transparence are the key factors, and can probably be applied to more complex problems. However you get into the realm of politics and politicians, who don’t like real accountability one little bit.

By: Beryl

Beryl — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:13:02 +0000

Further to Barry @ 9… why is Samefacts (Mark Kleiman et al’s blog) missing from CT’s “Lumber Room”?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:53:32 +0000

yay! communitarians sounding more libertarian and libertarians sounding more communitarian. long live elinor ostrom!

admission: never actually read ostrom. i’m not much of a social-scientist-type myself—i’d rather read randolph bourne—but it’s nice to see such a conversation taking place across the social science gamut…not something one sees everyday…

By: matthew kuzma

matthew kuzma — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:52:15 +0000

“Perhaps the closest parallel to Ostrom’s work is Jane Jacobs’.”

Impressively, I was getting that impression as I was reading up to that point. Now I’ll definitely have to check out that book.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:15:25 +0000

Nice post, which I enjoyed reading and which helps me to understand where Ostrom’s work fits in. One quibble, though, which applies not just here but almost everywhere. Garrett Hardin’s original Science paper is not about the failure of all commons. It is about why some commons fail, especially when social mechanisms—he was big on shame, not just “ownership”—fail, often because the community making use of the commons grows too large.

A careful reading of the original paper and subsequent books—Filters against folly is good—would stop this silly caricature of Hardin as inevitably pessimistic about all commons.