Phillip Hershkowitz

Why Elinor Ostrom Matters

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Do you know who Elinor Ostrom is? If you don’t you should. She just won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that it is perfectly possible for the commons to be managed sucessfully without being owned.

From the article:

Garrett Hardin called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed. But even Hardin later acknowledged that shared common resources did not inevitably have to end in destruction, saying that he should have called his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”

Why Elinor Ostrom Matters – Forbes.com