I’ve deeply been deeply influenced by Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012). This is my brief introduction to her work, with links to two lectures that I’ve recorded about her, drawing on chapter 4 of my book What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life. Lin Ostrom had many fans, including several of my colleagues at Tufts. […]
Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was a political scientist at Indiana University and a leader of the intellectual movement informally known as the Bloomington School. She won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 and was a MacArthur “genius” Fellow and president of the American Political Science Association. For me, she was a major inspiration, and I find […]
[Given today at Governing the Commons: 30 Years Later, a Virtual Symposium hosted by The Ostrom Workshop.] We are having a national debate about defunding the police or otherwise deeply restructuring criminal justice. The reasons are Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, and all the other unarmed African American civilians who have been […]
A newly published volume: Ostrom’s Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Public Policy of Elinor C. Ostrom, edited by Paul Dragos Aligica, Peter J. Boettke, and Roberta Q. Herzberg. I contribute a chapter entitled “’What Should We Do?’ The Bloomington School and the Citizen’s Core Question.” I argue that Elinor Ostrom’s thought offers powerful resources […]
Elinor Ostrom was my favorite scholar. Her research was empirically rigorous and methodologically innovative. After working with Vincent Ostrom on water management, she turned to a series of studies of police. Her findings are pertinent today, when crime has fallen but we are (and should be) deeply concerned about racial bias in the criminal justice system. […]