WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Indiana University Professor Elinor Ostrom told a worldwide audience today that the complexity of human social and economic behavior is something to be analyzed, understood and appreciated, not feared or denied. Ostrom’s research focuses on “the commons,” the concept of public resources that are owned by EVERYone and not by SOMEone…like our public lands, or even the Internet. Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work debunking the notion that a lack of central ownership spoils common resources. Ostrom says we don’t need commonly used property to be regulated by the state or controlled by specific individuals or companies. Instead, she argues that user groups tend to develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest and preserve the viability of a shared resource. Nobel Prize winner and longtime Bloomington resident Elinor Ostrom summarizes her half-century-long intellectual journey to understand the mechanisms of cooperation in human societies as she delivered her Nobel Prize Lecture this morning in Stockholm Sweden.
