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Endless Conversation
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Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons
Endless Conversation
By TONY EVANS
Express Staff Writer
Native Americans, as well as many other indigenous communities around the world, have been praised ceaselessly for their spiritual connections to Mother Nature. Oddly, they have not been as readily commended for their skills at managing natural resources.
Thanks to Elinor Ostrom, a scholar, activist and field researcher who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, indigenous communities may one day be looked to for solutions to some of the world's most pressing ecological problems.
Ostrum died on June 12, followed only a short while later by her husband, Vincent, but not before their work together brought a new understanding of and appreciation for the many complex methods human beings have used for centuries to create sustainable resource-use practices.
Ostrum, a political scientist by training, criticized long-held assumptions that top-down control is preferable to letting fishermen, hunters and farmers manage what she termed "common pool resources." By contrast, she showed that corporations aimed at profit or government agencies without deep ties to the land often do more harm than good.
In a valley such as ours, where commonly shared natural resources are a vital part of the economy, Ostrum's ideas are well worth noting. Who should we look to when seeking ways to regulate the shared use of our environmental resources?
Elinor Ostrum criticized in particular "The Tragedy of the Commons," an essay written by ecologist Garrett Hardin, first published in the journal Science in 1968. The essay cited historical sources to claim that herders using a commonly held field would, if left to their own devices, overuse and ultimately deplete the shared resource. The essay has been cited for decades in arguments in support of the privatization of once commonly used property.
Ostrum conducted field research around the world that showed the reverse to be true. For example, she found Turkish fishermen who had been drawing up coastal fishing maps and agreed-upon regulations in cafes for generations, and families in New Mexico and Nepal that had successfully managed communal water resources for agriculture, without the help of outside agencies.
Ostrum found that a government-engineered solution to irrigation challenges in one community was far less successful than one developed by farmers themselves.
Ostrum pointed out that open-ocean fishermen pose the greatest threat to fish populations because they work without the social controls that are a part of local communities.
"Trust is at the center of how people solve dilemmas," she said in one of her many lectures available on the Internet.
Ostrum's work inspired further research that she hoped would one day find a multitude of solutions to the threat of global warming, rather than relying solely on government institutions and private enterprise to save the day.
"We need to build enough diversity to cope with the diversity of the world—allow a multi-tiered system at multiple scales [instead of] a top-down panacea that is predicted to cure everything and instead kills it," she said. "The presumption is that it always has to be the state, the big guy with the gun, that needs to tell us what to do."
Ostrum also challenged a trend in economics that focuses on mathematical formulas, rather than analyzing data gathered from real-world practices. Although her work was only slowly accepted by the academic community, she succeeded in helping to establish several interdisciplinary institutions that use collaborations with scholars across academia, including ecologists, computer scientists and psychologists.
In a New York Times article this month, Ostrum's work was lauded by Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
"She would go and actually talk to Indonesian fisherman, or Maine lobstermen, and ask, 'How did you come to establish this limit on the fish catch? How did you deal with the fact that people might try to get around it?'" Folbre wrote. "Every successive cohort of economists is trained to put greater emphasis on the arsenal of mathematical and econometric expertise. That was just not what her work was about."
Ayn Rand on unemployment
Endless Conversation
By TONY EVANS
Express Staff WriterI have been inspired by the idea of a "calling," the old notion that we are called to a particular vocation or profession as if by divine guidance from deep within our souls.
I guess this is why one of my favorite literary characters is Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, the uncompromising architect who chooses work as a laborer in a stone quarry rather than alter his modernist designs to please a very wealthy and manipulative client.
Roark, the protagonist of the 1943 novel "The Fountainhead," chooses to toil in dusty obscurity until he gets another opportunity to spring his design masterpiece upon the world. He is beset again and again by people who assume they have the power to buy him out or thwart his idealism.
When I read the novel in 1982, I was not told that it carried a Trojan horse pill of American conservative idealism. I just thought it was cool that Roark stuck to his guns and didn't mind rolling up his sleeves and getting his hands dirty when things didn't work out.
Roark is rumored to be based on the real-life architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand and her Objectivist philosophy have become a major influence of libertarians and conservatives. As a Russian émigré fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, Rand reacted strongly in her writing against religious "mysticism" and state control, and in favor of laissez-faire capitalism.
But what if Rand's hero had instead left the quarry and applied for food stamps and unemployment insurance while looking for a job more befitting of his professional training? Well, for one thing, he probably would not have wound up slapped in the face with a riding crop by a mounted heiress on a dirt road, an event that marked the beginning of the romantic drama in the novel.
But perhaps more importantly, Roark may have more readily put his talents to good use. According to groundbreaking new research by Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty, such a move may also benefit society in general, especially during extended economic recessions like that of the present.
To think of Howard Roark on unemployment, surfing www.Monsterjobs.com at the public library, would no doubt give Rand fits, but Chetty, 32, the youngest tenured economics professor at Harvard, has made a case for extending unemployment benefits during the current recession. Chetty says it makes sense for trained professionals to take time to find the right job, rather than jump at the first opportunity for work.
Rand likely would have chastened Chetty for taking the wind out of Roark's sails, quashing his human spirit and spoiling him with socialism, but Chetty comes from no such premise. His father, V. K. Chetty, was an economic adviser to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1980s, helping her privatize the government-run cement industry as India's economy began to make the transition from socialism to free-market capitalism.
Using unusually complicated mathematical formulas and naturally occurring economic experiments in Austria, Chetty Jr. showed that even in normal times, the benefits of unemployment insurance are high relative to work-disincentive costs. He showed that these benefits are increased during long recessions and periods of long-term unemployment due to the secondary risks of depleted assets, foreclosures and potential collapses of credit markets.
Howard Roark may not have been ruined had he received a hand up when he needed it most. It may have also helped the rest of the economy get on its feet.