Elinor (Lin) Ostrom of Indiana University was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. Lin died June 12^th after diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late 2011. Following her diagnosis she traveled to India and Mexico, and taught a graduate seminar. 

Having known her for 45 plus years, I was not surprised by her courage and continuing good work. She wrote her last commentary on the day she died. Lin’s best-known book is “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.” It examines effective governance systems for common-pool resources, drawing on studies of water management districts, irrigation systems, grazing resources, fisheries, forests, and other examples.

I had just completed a book chapter involving Lin and her husband Vincent when I learned of her death. The chapter was for a book edited by Dwight Lee. My chapter was on the contributions of Public Choice economics to environmental analysis. James Buchanan, another Nobel laureate, and his colleague Gordon Tullock were founders of Public Choice. Lin and Vincent introduced me to them when I was a grad student at Indiana University. Both of the Ostroms served as president of the Public Choice Society. Below is a section of my chapter dealing with Lin and Vincent.

“Professors Elinor (Lin) and Vincent Ostrom had recently come to IU from UCLA. We had several common interests, including working with wood, and soon became friends. Although not a student in their fledging center, I was attracted to them personally and to their philosophies. I housesat for the Ostroms one summer while they vacationed in my mother’s cottage on the Manitoulin Island of Ontario. The following year I helped the Ostroms construct their log summer home on an isolated site, no electricity, on the shore of Lake Huron. To them the term ‘workshop’ had physical as well as intellectual meaning. 

“Here is how the Ostroms and Buchannan and Tullock’s Public Choice consolidated at IU. The Ostroms had met Buchanan at UCLA just after he left UVA. Gordon was at Rice and both he and Jim wanted to relocate. Jim and Gordon’s quite different personalities were more than complementary, they were multipliers. All would benefit if they found a common academic home. 

“The Ostroms were working on problems of managing common property resources when they arrived at IU in 1964. They created a center; a ‘workshop’ focused on public choice and political economy perspectives. They emphasized empirical research and applied policy analysis and were explicit in using theory to derive testable hypotheses. Much of their work involved appropriate institutional arrangements for dealing with common property. Their center became the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in 1973. Lin won a Nobel in Economics in 2009 for her work on the economics of the commons. (Tom Schelling, another Nobel Prize economist with close ties to Bozeman, was her advocate. Tom was impressed that I had worked with her.)

“Jim and Gordon’s seminal work, Calculus of Consent (1962), was one of the Ostroms key readings. (Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action was another. Olson wrote his Harvard economics dissertation under Tom Schelling.) The Ostroms told a few graduate students they wanted to attract Buchanan and Tullock to IU. They invited Tullock to Bloomington for talks and to meet faculty. They also hosted a dinner at their home on Lampkins Ridge Road, with a few faculty and at least one graduate student.

“I feel exceedingly lucky to have gone to IU for grad school. Had I not, I wouldn’t have studied with Vince and Lin, met Gordon and Jim, published a book with ecologist Garrett Hardin, studied the Hutterite Brethren, and received a post-doc in environmental policy. All this led to Bozeman and the creation of the NRE with its foundations in Public Choice.”

I brought Lin and Vincent to MSU for lectures a decade after I arrived. I last saw her at a conference in Boston last year. Her work, and that of the workshop she and Vincent founded at IU, will resonate for decades.   

Richard Epstein was also at the aforementioned Boston conference and had these words to share about Lin’s passing posted June 12, 2012 on Ricochet:  

“The news just arrived that the economics profession—and the lawyers who have depended on it—have lost a giant in the field with the death of Elinor Ostrom at the age of 78. I did not have the privilege to work directly with Elinor in my own work on natural resources and the commons, but have, like everyone else in the field, been deeply influenced by what she said and wrote. Two years ago she organized along with her colleague, Daniel H. Cole, in the University of Indiana—Bloomington, a conference that dealt with legal regimes used for the regulation of the commons to which I contributed a paper. It was evident both from her own contribution, and from the comments that she made throughout the conference about other papers that she was the master of her own field. She combined what so many economists today lack: a deep awareness of institutional arrangements along with a solid grasp of basic economic theory, which allowed her to show how small differences in social organization could lead to the difference between a sustainable commons and one that could crash because of its internal instability. That work is often a refreshing change from some of the highly formalized, blackboard models that sacrifice institutional richness for mathematical rigor. The Nobel Prize, which was the capstone of her distinguished career, offers ample testimony to the influence of her work, not only within her chosen profession of economics, but across the field of social sciences, broadly construed. She gave much in her studies, and her work promises to outlive her passing. She is much appreciated, and will be sorely missed.”