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overcoming tragedy on econtalk
... on the nobel prize-winning study of how people sometimes overcome the tragedy of the commons, pointing out how people are able to develop arrangements on their own for dealing with public goods.
The tragedy of the commons is a recurring theme/meme in the arguments of libertarians, used to illustrate how public ownership is fraught with consquences that run counter to the nominal aims of resource preservation and sustainment. The public goods are overused, poorly managed, and ultimately destroyed by the the actions of people in the absence of clear property rights. So the argument goes.
What the Ostroms brought to this discussion is the observation that sometimes communities manage to avoide this outcome, so the question is why, and much of the answer relates to personal contact in the community, long associations, and slowly developing mores that establish rewards and punishments for better or less good stewardship of the resource held in common.
The finding of course relates to how people live in small and personal communities, but also in much larger an less personal ones, and the approaches that work in one do not necessarily work well in the other.
Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, and the Bloomington School (11/30/2009) - Peter Boettke of George Mason University and author of Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School (co-authored with Paul Dragos Aligica), talks about the Bloomington School--the political economy of Elinor Ostrom (2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics), Vincent Ostrom, and their students and colleagues at Indiana University. The discussion begins with the empirical approach of Elinor Ostrom and others who have studied the myriad of ways that actual communities have avoided the tragedy of commons. Boettke emphasizes the distinction between privatization vs. informal norms and cultural rules that prevent overuse. The conversation also looks at urban development and the benefits and costs of multiple municipalities vs. a single, large city. Throughout, Boettke embeds the conversation in the Ostroms' interest in how the citizenry can be self-governing and the challenges of implementing local knowledge.