Elinor Ostrom Blog Blurb

     Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was an American-born political scientist and economist.  She won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics.  Her major work involved explaining and complicating the classic economic idea involving the tragedy of the commons.  "It's a problem, it's just not necessarily a tragedy," Ostrom said in a 2009 interview.  "The problem is that people can overuse [a shared resource], it can be destroyed, and it is a big challenge to figure out how to avoid that."  Her research uncover many examples where a shared resource, such as pastures in the Alps, were used by many members of the community.  She stated that modern economists were "wrong to indicate that people were helplessly trapped and the only way out was some external government coming in or dividing it up into chunks and everyone owning their own."  Instead, she argued and showed examples of how by doing something small for the common good, such as building a fence around the entire pasture versus dividing it up helped everyone and contributed to a lack of the tragedy of the commons.  The Guardian writes, "Her work was for a long time considered far outside the mainstream of American political science."