Elinor Ostrom | Women in Economics

- [Assistant] We've been on set.

- [Tyler] But this is
already improvised so...

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- [Narrator] Economists,
not a group with a lot of Marys,

Natashas or Juanitas, and that's
caused a lot of controversy.

However, what's often overlooked
are the actual female economists

who are pushing economics forward
by addressing real world issues.

Welcome to "Women In Economics."

- [Assistant] There's certain norms
about you use social methods, right?

That's you.

- [Tyler] Yeah.

Let's try a little bit on that.

- [Assistant] Ostrom, take two, marker.

- So when I talk about economics
based on the cooperation

of a local community,
some people's minds might

instantly jump to...

But no, Elinor Ostrom
wasn't a socialist.

Born in Los Angeles, and a child
of the Great Depression era,

Ostrom's childhood
was colored by digging

a wartime victory vegetable garden,
knitting scarves for the troops,

and buying her clothes
in a charity store.

From an early age,
the principles of cooperation

and also resource conservation --

They were ingrained deeply
in her view of the world.

- [Elinor] I had to learn
very early how to work hard

and be independent.

- So it's no surprise that what's

arguably her greatest
accomplishments in economics --

they have to do
with disproving the consensus

and what's been known
as the "tragedy of the commons."

But hold on.

What is the tragedy of the commons?

Economists widely assumed
that the common ownership

of important resources would result
in excessive exploitation.

- [Elinor] People using a pasture
or a lake or something --

they're helplessly trapped
into trying to get

as much as they can for themselves.

- Imagine fishermen overfishing
a common pond

because each fisherman
is afraid the others will

pull out the fish first.

So they all take
out fish very rapidly.

The next thing you know,

there won't be any fish left
in the pond.

She didn't take that consensus
as a given.

- Her history made her used
to being a contrarian.

- [Elinor] So in the early years,
I think being a woman was

a big handicap.

Getting into graduate school
was a challenge.

My mother wasn't even enthusiastic
about my going to college.

Where it was you'll never be able
to teach in a major university.

You just can't get a job...
dada, dada, da,

- In other words, she had
to recognize repeatedly

that what the establishment
was saying wasn't always right.

- [Elinor] But I just got
fascinated with what I was doing,

and so being a stubborn
son-of-a-gun, I just kept going.

- So she approached the
tragedy of the commons problem

in a quite different way.

Rather than just
the typical theorizing found

in economics texts at the time,
she took a case study approach.

She got out of the office,

and she talked
to people on the ground.

She traveled to investigate communal
irrigation systems in Spain,

forests in Nepal
and mountain villages in Japan.

- We found all sorts of patterns
out there in the world.

People self-organize
common property institutions

of a wide diversity of kind

and sometimes
solve problems very well.

- She inserted herself
into communities,

and she collaborated
with other disciplines,

not just economics,
but also ecology,

computer science and psychology.

All of that informed her research
and her findings.

Ostrom's key insight was
to point out that very often,

at least under
the right circumstances,

these tragedy of the commons
problems can be solved,

especially they can be solved
by small groups.

- And empirical work has shown,
people have found ways

of agreeing on their own rules

and extracting themselves
from the problem.

- If you look
at her total number of citations,

how many times other researchers
mentioned her work,

she really was very close
at the top, and in 2009,

Lin became the first woman
to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

[applause]

One way to solve problems
is centralized government control

or maybe turn resource management
over to a big private company,

but Elinor Ostrom laid out
how group norms applied

at the local level
really could help to solve

a lot of environmental problems --

that those small groups
they would develop rules

telling hunters how many deer
can you shoot this season,

how many fish can you pull
out of the ground,

how much water can you draw
from the aquifer,

and that communities working
on that small, local scale

using sanctions and rules
and local governance --

that they would be able to address
a lot of environmental problems,

and I think of Elinor Ostrom
as really one of the great

environmental optimists of our time.

- We've been taught those rules
are the rules,

and what we know from the field
is that rules on paper

and rules in form are different.

- Maybe to stop there.

- [Narrator] Want to better
understand Ostrom

and the tragedy of the commons?

Click here for related materials
and practice questions.

Or, check out other videos
on how economists are tackling

real-world problems,
such as poverty, education

and unemployment.

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