drwex | Another loss (RIP Elinor Ostrom)

Elinor Ostrom was the only woman to win the Nobel prize in Economics and one of the few non-economists to win it. Her work expanded our understanding of how "tragedy of the commons"-type problems could be handled.

I had a brief brush with her early "Governing the Commons" as part of my dissertation research. I had not realized until I read some of the obits for her just how prolific she had been in the last two decades, particularly working on areas such as informal economies and knowledge economies, though she's best known for hands-on work with physical systems like community grazing fields and village-level irrigation systems. Unlike a lot of economists she didn't just sit in her office and create mathematical formalisms. She did real field work in Africa and Asia.