2009 Nobel Prize

Professor Ben Powell supplies his thoughts on both the 2009 Nobel Prize and a grad discussion board about the topic as well as some further reading material. Enjoy!

Sorry I'm a bit slow on this but I was out of the country until last night and am only now reading the commentary on this year's nobel prize winners Lin Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. I was shocked and thrilled to see this year's announcement. Williamson was not a surprise at all but I would have expected him to share the prize with Alchien or Demsetz. Instead by awarding it with Elinor the committee has highlighted a commonality in that both of them illustrating how to generate institutions to improve economic outcomes. In Williamson's case, it's the reason for the firm. In Elinor's it's the spontaneous generation of rules governing the commons and the reason why many top down solutions don't work. In both cases these should be conceived of as institutions embedded in the market or more broadly, civil society.

The reason I'm writing to the grad students specifically (and cc'ing the faculty) is because of the very troubling grad student blog (and very popular) I read this morning (warning, comments in it are vulgar and sexist):

The crux of their complaints seem to be that Elinor shouldn't have one because:
1) They never read her in their grad education
2) She hasn't published in many "top" economics journals
3) She's trained in political science and therefore not capable of doing economics.

This is a VERY sad state of affairs. They instead should feel ashamed of the lack of breadth of their own reading and their narrow focus outside of the broader tradition of political economy. Elinor asks some of the biggest "big think" type questions about institutions that should have a major impact in one's thinking on economic development especially but many other things as well. Her main publications have been books rather than econ journals and she's influenced some of the other big thinkers in economics (for instance 2002 Nobel winner Vernon Smith). Her work doesn't collapse neatly into a max subject to type framework or other training these grad students have got. Instead of seeing this as a limitation of their models they see it as a limitation of what is interesting. This is very shallow thinking and blinds them to important questions. I'm glad I work in a place that does have some appreciation for a more broad tradition of political economy.

I encourage you all to get some knowledge of Ostrom (and Williamson but if you've done any IO you'll be familiar with him anyway, or perhaps should be regardless of field since he is the world's most cited economist). Here are a few excellent blog posts or op-ed's by accomplished economists who will give you a general sense of her work. If you want to read her own writing her most influential book is "Governing the Commons" but that is rather high cost. There was just a nice symposium in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization that summarizes the bloomington school and includes a contribution from her:
June 2005 57(2), "Polycentric Political Economy: Essays in honor of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom" that would be a lower cost intro.

At a minimum check out some of the following:

David Henderson's WSJ op-ed:

Vernon Smith's Forbes column:

Paul Romer's Blog:

Alex Tabborak's blog:

Peter Boettke's Blog:

And Peter Klein on Williamson

Congrats to Ostrom and Williamson and happy reading to all of you.